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OTHER BOOKS BY BISHOP McCONNELL 


CHRISTIAN FOCUS 
THE INCREASE OF FAITH 
RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 
CHRISTMAS SERMONS 
EDWARD GAYER ANDREWS 
THE DIVINER IMMANENCE 
THE ESSENTIALS OF METHODISM 
UNDERSTANDING THE SCRIPTURES 
PUBLIC OPINION AND THEOLOGY 
THE PREACHER AND THE PEOPLE 

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®f)e Jieto Cra Hecturesifjip, {Hnibersitp of 
^>outf)ern California—fEtyirb i£>erieg 


Living Together 

Studies in the Ministry 
of Reconciliation 


By 

FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL 

t I 

One of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church 



THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK <Z j ^ 3 L , CINCINNATI 













Copyright, 1923, by 
FRANCIS JOHN McCONNELL 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into 
foreign languages, including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 

©C1A760865 

NOV 14 ”23 




NOTE 


These lectures were delivered on the New Era 
Foundation at the University of Southern California 
in April, 1923. My thanks are due Dr. John F. 
Fisher, Dean of the School of Religion, and Dr. 
Rufus B. von KleinSmid, President of the Univer¬ 
sity, for great and innumerable kindnesses shown 
me during my stay at the University. I was given 
complete freedom both in the choice of the theme 
and its treatment. It is, of course, understood that 
I alone am responsible for any opinions expressed in 
the lectures. 

Acknowledgment is hereby made to the editor of 
the Journal of Religion , of the University of Chicago, 
for permission to use in various parts of this discus¬ 
sion material taken from an article in “What Shall 
the Church do with the Young Radicals?” which I 
contributed to the Journal in July, 1923. 

Francis J. McConnell. 


V 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 


I. Living Together—Presuppositions ... 9 

II. Is Church Unity Possible?. 47 

III. The Church and Labor. 86 

IV. Can Patriotism Be Saved?. 127 

V. Better Terms With Science. 167 

VI. Christianity and Rising Tides of 

Color . 206 







v> 


I 


LIVING TOGETHER- 
PRESUPPOSITIONS 

The most urgent question before the 
Christian world to-day concerns the possi¬ 
bility of Christianity’s helping men to live 
together. We, of course, recognize this 
duty in the more immediate personal con¬ 
tacts, as in our relations to our families and 
to our closer neighbors. Have not our Ten 
Commandments told us not to steal, nor to 
bear false witness, nor to commit adultery, 
nor to covet, nor to kill? While the facts 
of private quarrels and of broken homes 
are as numerous as they are we would not 
boast that we have made complete success 
of the Christian religion even in these nar¬ 
rower fields, but we have done something. 
The Christian family—or possibly the in¬ 
creasing Christianization of the family—is 
probably the largest single item of social 
gain thus far to be put down to humanity’s 
credit. 

When we look away to the wider social 

9 



10 


LIVING TOGETHER 


activities our discouragement begins. So¬ 
cial classes, nations, races are arrayed 
against each other to-day as never before. 
If we reflect for just an instant on the pos¬ 
sibilities of destruction lodged in our mod¬ 
ern scientific knowledge, we are, in mo¬ 
ments of particularly deep depression, 
tempted to ask if we are not already en¬ 
tering into that twilight of civilization 
whose imminence is the theme of so many 
despairing social students to-day. In our 
childhood we used to frighten ourselves 
with pictures of a Day of Judgment on 
which by divine decree the world and all 
therein would perish in huge conflagration. 
The child’s fear of a divinely caused cos¬ 
mic explosion and catastrophe has given 
way to the man’s fear of a humanly caused 
holocaust in which all traces of civilization 
may pass in flame and smoke. Only one 
great nation has succeeded in achieving 
social stability through four thousand 
years, and that is the very simple social 
organism called China. Wall in China for 
a thousand years and at the end of that 
time China would be going on about as 
now. Wall in Christendom for a thousand 



PRESUPPOSITIONS 


11 


years and at the end of the time there 
might not be anything or anybody left. 

The first response of the church to the 
present plight of the world is a call to 
evangelism, by which is meant the indi¬ 
vidual’s turning from his sins and his con¬ 
secration to unceasing battle with sin and 
selfishness. I would not by an ounce of 
power minimize the importance of this 
appeal to individualistic evangelism. It 
will not alone, however, solve our prob¬ 
lems. May I, with all respect to the 
evangelistically minded, say that an em¬ 
phasis on individualistic evangelism alone 
might make our peril more acute? For the 
attack of such individualism is so thor¬ 
oughly on individual sin and selfishness 
that the quickening of individual unselfish¬ 
ness might lead the newly aroused convert 
to a passionate devotion to a cause socially 
wrong. It might lead him to headlong 
sacrifice in a war in which he personally 
would reveal the noblest unselfishness for 
a cause socially selfish. A distinguished 
military leader once urged upon me the 
need of preaching forgiveness of sins and 
faith in God and immortality to soldiers 


12 


LIVING TOGETHER 


going into battle, for the sake of making 
them better fighters. We can see here at 
once the possibility of utilizing personal 
unselfishness for the purpose of intensifying 
group selfishness. 

We are in no better plight in the field 
of industry. The personal conversion of 
selfish employers or selfish labor leaders 
might make them more convinced of the 
righteousness of their own policies. So 
also in the sphere of racial contacts. In 
that field the patronizing attitude of a 
white man toward a black or yellow 
man, or of even a missionary toward a 
convert from heathenism, might be prac¬ 
tically only little better than outright neg¬ 
lect. A patronizing spirit in such re¬ 
lationships is a curse, yet an individual’s 
own tendency to patronize might be in¬ 
creased with an emphasis on personal 
unselfishness. If we are to make Chris¬ 
tianity count as a force helping men to 
live together in industrial, national, and 
racial intimacies, there must of necessity 
be emphasis on bringing institutional and 
group activities under the power of Chris¬ 
tianity. This does not mean that we are 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


13 


to go forth on an arid campaign of dealing 
with impersonal social factors. We are to 
try to help persons see the longer reaches 
of their personal power, and their respon¬ 
sibility, at least to a degree, for the farther 
reaches of that power. John Fiske used to 
say that the invention of the telescope and 
microscope was the same as the addition 
to human beings of new eyes, and Lotze 
once whimsically remarked that even the 
extension of human reach through a walk¬ 
ing stick is an extension of personality. To 
vary the figure we may look upon our¬ 
selves as trigger-pullers or lever-pullers. 
The man who pulls the trigger is at least 
partly responsible for what the bullet 
strikes, and he who manipulates a lever 
cannot well claim that he did not know 
that hammers would pound and cog-wheels 
tear and saws bite. We can, of course, 
easily overdo the individual responsibility 
here, as in any dealing with a social organi¬ 
zation, but I am trying to state the con¬ 
ception in personal rather than impersonal 
terms. The institutions under which we 
work are man-made, or men-made. Men 
are running the institutions to-day. 


14 


LIVING TOGETHER 


Let us push this just a little further. We 
all admit the importance of some social 
creations—like language, for example. Man 
made language. Man made laws. Even if 
the laws are formulated customs, the cus¬ 
toms are the customs of people. We live 
in a man-made world. Look at a land like 
China. Of course the all-inclusive natural 
forces are mightily determinative, but 
within the network of these forces there is 
play enough for human activities to justify 
us in saying that even the soil of China 
has been so worked over by human hands 
through four thousand years that it is 
virtually a man-made soil. So with any 
preeminently agricultural country. Muscle 
and brain are almost literally mixed with 
the earth. 

At this point some one will say that the 
social forces of the world are themselves 
bringing men closer together and that these 
new spatial contacts are solving the prob¬ 
lems of men’s living together. There is a 
dreadful fallacy here, the fallacy that 
spatial contact of itself makes for spiritual 
fellowship. It may do nothing of the sort. 
There is a stage in personal and group 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


15 


civilization when persons and peoples need 
fences. They feel better toward one an¬ 
other when they are not in too close touch. 
A community has come far along toward 
Christian fellowship when the neighbors 
can take down their fences. The expe¬ 
rience of the last fifty years can hardly be 
cited in proof of the growth of transporta¬ 
tion systems as harbingers of new spiritual 
contacts. A road may be a means of 
spiritual communication, but we have to 
take account of who is on the road and 
what he is on the road for. The closer 
some people and peoples get to one an¬ 
other the more danger of clash and bit¬ 
terness. 

What we have said about institutions 
being in the last analysis personal rather 
than impersonal may seem a counsel of 
despair. Even if it is all true, if institu¬ 
tions are the extension of personal activi¬ 
ties, what can one individual do? That is 
just the point. One individual alone can¬ 
not do much. That is why I protest 
against his being considered alone. I 
would try to make the individual see his 
own long radius of power and to see also 


16 


LIVING TOGETHER 


the multiplication of his forces when he 
sets himself to work with his fellows. Two 
men seeking to influence the thinking of 
their time are not two arithmetically. 
There is more than even a geometrical in¬ 
crease of personal forces when men in 
larger and larger groups take to acting 
purposely. Institutions that have grown 
up in an absent-minded fashion can be 
changed as men set their minds to work 
on them. A shrewd publicist once said 
that England became an empire automati¬ 
cally in a fit of absent-mindedness. That 
may be, but she cannot remain an empire 
except as she goes at her problems in 
present-minded fashion, with millions of 
men the world round deliberately cooper¬ 
ating in a common task. 

Looking now at some principles which 
must guide us in our attempts as Chris¬ 
tians to help men live together, we remark 
first that all Christian contacts must base 
themselves on regard for the inalienable 
sacredness of every person. If we could 
once get social, national, and international 
groups to a basis of mutual appreciative 



PRESUPPOSITIONS 


17 


respect, many of our problems would solve 
themselves. It seems hopelessly trite and 
commonplace to say that men should al¬ 
ways be approached as men, but some day 
that trite and commonplace observation 
will take on the force of a new discovery, 
significant enough fairly to stagger the 
world into a realization of the enormity of 
some social processes. Ought men be asked 
to do work that could be shifted to steel 
arms? Ought men be asked to run the risk 
of disease and degradation in inhuman liv¬ 
ing conditions? Ought men be ordered 
into dug-outs or poisoned with deadly gas 
or blown to bits for the sake of the capture 
of sources of raw material? Ought men of 
lower development in tropical lands live 
under systems of compulsory labor im¬ 
posed by men of professedly higher devel¬ 
opment? Simple questions like these, in¬ 
sistently put, may change or finally 
overthrow whole economic and social sys¬ 
tems. The Christian must start with a 
man’s worth on his own account. The 
student of society tells us that we can 
never have social peace without social like- 
mindedness. The chief element in Chris- 


18 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tian like-mindedness is the common 
recognition of the worth of a man as a 
man. 

Let me use an illustration to suggest 
that some things must not be done to men, 
no matter what the character of the men 
themselves. I know a community which 
during the last war became filled with 
blackest hatred against the foes of the 
United States. There was in that com¬ 
munity a man of foreign birth who per¬ 
sisted in saying wildly unpatriotic things 
against the United States. One night a 
group of citizens drove this alien through 
the streets with a horse’s bit fastened be¬ 
tween his teeth. As soon as the war fever 
began to die down the better citizens of 
the community repented in deep bitterness 
of the outrage upon the alien. In what 
did the outrage consist? The man was not 
hurt. No blows were struck. His prop¬ 
erty was not destroyed. After the one act 
against him he was not further molested. 
There had been no doubt as to the un¬ 
patriotic nature of his utterances. By the 
law of the land he was liable to imprison¬ 
ment or at least internment. Why, then. 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


19 


the bitterness of repentance? Because a 
human ideal had been sinned against. A 
man had been treated in a way in which 
no man ever should be treated, no matter 
what he has done, for even the punish¬ 
ments of men should conform to the re¬ 
gards of essential humanity. Respect for 
humanity in myself and in others is the 
first step toward the reconciliation of 
groups and of nations and of races. In 
spite of what I have previously said against 
impersonalism there has to be a trace of 
something almost impersonal here. A par¬ 
ticular individual may not be himself espe¬ 
cially respectable, and it is hard to give 
respect long to what is not inherently 
respectable. The matter is not wholly one 
of the personal desert of the individual. 
The individual is made in fashion as a 
man, and since he is a man he must be 
treated as a man. He has an inalienable 
title to our Christian respect, no matter 
who he is, or what he is, or whether he 
does or does not care anything about 
such matters himself. While we cannot in 
detail tell how to state the claim of human¬ 
ity on all occasions, in general the Chris- 


20 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tian must found a new society on the basis 
that these claims are absolute. Funda¬ 
mentally all men stand alike on the one 
plane of their humanity. 

Now, let us step over to another point 
of view and talk in phrases which may 
seem to contradict what we have just been 
saying. If there is something which we 
hold as absolute in the claim of a man 
because he is a man, there is something 
also admittedly relative in the same claim, 
which is for the cynic excuse for bitter 
sport and for the Christian the ground for 
the largest charity. While men are all 
alike men, it is also true that even the 
best men and the best groups are in process 
of continual improvement. It has been 
said that the loftiest characteristic of man 
is his capability for being endlessly im¬ 
proved. We are not dealing with finished 
creations when we are dealing with men. 
We have not to do with animals on the 
one hand, or with angels on the other, but 
with beings capable of passing out of 
animalism into a state better than that of 
any angels which have ever been described 
to us. All men are men, with the differ- 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


21 


ences between them slight and insignificant 
as compared with the difference between 
man and anything below him in the scale 
of being. Still, the differences between 
men and the differences between social 
groups and nations and races do count. 
It is a plain duty to recognize these dif¬ 
ferences, but to distinguish differences in 
differences. For some differences between 
groups come out of the differing rates of 
progress of the groups, and some differ¬ 
ences may have a deep root pointing to 
something distinctive in the group. The 
absoluteness of man as man and the rela¬ 
tivity of men as men are alike real. 

We have said that this relativity of de¬ 
velopment is a ground for social charity. 
Lacking such charity it is easy to make 
an individual or group appear hypocritical 
and false because of a contradiction in 
character or activity. With the more char¬ 
itable view the contradiction is seen to be 
between the part of the nature or of the 
life which has been brought under moral 
control, it may be, and the part which 
has not. Redemption of human life is like 
the clearing away of a jungle or the drain- 


22 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ing of a swamp. We do not call the re¬ 
deemer of the land false or hypocritical 
because not all the forest or swamp is con¬ 
quered. We simply say that the work is 
not yet complete. So when we come upon 
oozy swamps in social life, or stand at the 
edge of a social jungle and hear the tigers 
call, all that is necessary to say is that the 
work of redemption is not yet perfect. It 
has, moreover, been established of old that 
social misdeeds are not to be branded as 
purposely wicked if they are not recog¬ 
nized by their doers as evil. To those who 
know better these things are sin, but they 
may not involve for the people who ig¬ 
norantly practice them the moral upset 
which comes from open-eyed sinning 
against an ideal. Polygamy, infanticide, 
and such evils are largely passing away 
even among backward peoples, thank 
Heaven, but among backward peoples they 
have never meant the moral obliquity they 
would have meant among twentieth-century 
Americans or Europeans. Without lower¬ 
ing our own standards we are morally obli¬ 
gated to train ourselves to see how life 
looks through eyes other than our own, 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


23 


so far as such a feat of spiritual imagina¬ 
tion is humanly possible. 

In seeking social progress the Christian 
ought not to forget that he is dealing with 
living organisms, be these organisms indi¬ 
viduals or groups of individuals. The 
Christian message that Christ is the Key 
to the meaning of man’s life and of God’s 
life, will have to be stated in such terms 
that it can be seized by life processes. It 
is food, drink, air! It must be seized as 
all nourishment is seized—by an effort and 
appropriation of will. The word of Jesus 
is not merely to be listened to, but to be 
consumed, to be taken into the life as the 
rule of life. 

It is in awaiting this appropriation of 
the truth by an organism that we have 
need of patience, patience, and still more 
patience. There is no telling beforehand 
where obedient acceptance of the life of 
Christ will lead either an individual or a 
group. Some of the truth as we present 
it will be worked over and discarded; some 
of it will be fused with elements of which 
we have never thought; some of it will be 
endowed with an energy of which we had 


24 


LIVING TOGETHER 


no premonitions. All formal statements 
are instrumental. When we give a group 
a gospel we give a tool or a food or a gar¬ 
ment. That group may fashion over the 
tool to new purposes, or out of the food 
may build a type of physical strength we 
did not foresee, or wear the garments in a 
fashion utterly unlike anything ever be¬ 
fore seen. Paul once said that he was sure 
that life could not separate him from the 
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. If 
we are dealing with real life, that life will 
lead us to and not away from Christ. We 
are all a little afraid to let the life in Christ 
run its full course in social realms, but the 
life would and could lead only to Christ. 

It is out of some clear recognition that 
we are all human beings and out of some 
charitableness of mutual understanding and 
tolerance toward human differences that 
we shall finally succeed in finding ways to 
live together as groups. May I say also 
that this intelligent charity and regard will 
finally have to go far enough to respect 
persons and groups whom we cannot fully 
understand and whose peculiarities may 
not come merely out of the stage of human 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


25 


experience through which they are passing. 
The peculiarities may be part of the na¬ 
tive furnishing of the individual or group 
mind, and I may not be able to bring my¬ 
self to adequate understanding of or sym¬ 
pathy with them. Assuming that these 
distinctive marks do not come of anti¬ 
social purpose and are not being put upon 
me, what is to be my attitude toward those 
who hold them? Tolerance. It may be 
that some group views are a necessity of 
the life of human beings of temperament 
radically different from my own; it may 
be that they are the expression of social 
moods to which I cannot attain. It may 
be also, in a word, that they are literally 
and strictly none of my business. What, 
in the name of all that is human, is to be 
the use of living together if everybody is 
always to live out in the full glare of pub¬ 
licity, with no thoughts peculiarly any¬ 
body’s own? One reason for the search 
for a way to live together better is to get 
rid of the features of social existence which 
hinder our attending to our own spiritual 
business, or thwart our being partisans of 
our own chosen groups, or fighters for our 


26 


LIVING TOGETHER 


own ideas. The tolerance I mean does not 
imply a stupid impartiality. It implies 
liberty for partialities. 

Was it not Edward Bellamy who told of 
a psychic isle where a shipwrecked traveler 
found the natives laughing every time he 
tried to speak? After a little it dawned 
upon him that the strange islanders were 
laughing just because he was speaking, 
whereas the psychic conditions were such 
that all his thoughts lay open and exposed 
to the psychic islanders without the use 
of words. If that is a picture of a fully 
socialized group, I don’t want to join it. 
We are not indeed to harbor selfish or 
mean secrets, but we are to hold to an 
inviolable sacredness of personal life—no 
harm in calling it absolutely sacred—on 
which we must build if we are to live to¬ 
gether on terms that make life worth liv¬ 
ing. John Dewey spoke profoundly when 
he said of the Chinese, for example, that 
the Chinese faults come largely out of the 
fact that from the cradle to the grave 
the Chinese live too much under the 
scrutiny of one another. The life is too 
public, without enough of the privacy 



PRESUPPOSITIONS 27 

which makes for the peculiar and dis¬ 
tinctive. 

All of my discussion proceeds on the 
assumption of democratic method, of 
course, with the majority vote settling all 
ordinary questions. Democracy assumes 
that men will be good losers and that they 
will adjust themselves to the decisions of 
the majority, either to give that decision 
its chance or to work for its repeal by 
orderly method. Often it happens that 
the outworking of a decisive vote accepted 
in good faith leads even the opponents of 
the vote to concede its wisdom. In all 
democracy, however, there must be care 
for the preservation of everything that is 
worth while in the distinctiveness of the 
separate life. 

Another prerequisite of Christian living 
together is the possibility of absorption of 
various groups in common tasks. There 
was in a far-off period of church history 
a debate about the doctrine of the Trinity 
which seems singularly remote to us of 
to-day. In fact, it is so remote that it 
seems almost unearthly in its lack of con- 



28 


LIVING TOGETHER 


nection with anything that now appears 
real. The debate had to do with the so- 
called filioque clause in the old creed. The 
question was as to whether the Holy Spirit 
proceeded from the Son as well as from 
the Father in an orthodox interpretation 
of the Trinity. 

It is hard to believe that such a question 
as this ever could have been discussed out¬ 
side of theological schools, and it is equally 
hard to see how it could have been dis¬ 
cussed in the schools in any but an aca¬ 
demic fashion. Still th e filioque clause was 
once the theme of heated, even angry de¬ 
bates, not only in the schools but upon the 
streets. Of course, much of the popular 
debate had to do with other than strictly 
theological, or even religious, concerns. 
Loyalty to leaders and devotion to parties 
entered in to add fire to the arguments. 
Nevertheless, there were two important 
theological considerations at stake. One, 
as we all know, had to do with the place 
which was to be assigned to Christ in the 
universe. Was he equal to the Father? 
It may not be too much to say that the 
future of Christianity turned upon the 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


29 


answer to that question, and it was around 
that question that the debate chiefly cen¬ 
tered. 

The other theological question was not 
so clearly on the surface, but it was im¬ 
plied in the debate nevertheless. The old 
theologies were trying to get a ground of 
unity in the Godhead. They did not con¬ 
ceive of the Trinity as three independent 
Gods. They united Son and Spirit to the 
Father by a thought of “procession” which 
it is a strain for us to follow; and more 
important than philosophical unity in the 
Godhead, in their thought, was spiritual 
unity. They early saw that Father and 
Son could not vitally be united if each 
were just the object of the loving gaze of 
the other. So they made the forth-going 
of the Spirit a mighty enterprise in which 
each was alike implicated. The fellowship 
of Father and Son was a fellowship in the 
Spirit, in the sending forth of the Spirit 
and in the on-goings of the Spirit. Father 
and Son were to find their fellowship not 
in gazing directly upon one another, but in 
a vast putting forth of energy, with a com¬ 
mon aim, upon a common object. The 


30 


LIVING TOGETHER 


early thinkers of the church were trying to 
found a Divine Society in the life of God 
himself, and they made the Spirit the bond 
of union between Father and Son. 

We may not argue for the Trinity to-day 
in the terms of the church Fathers. Nev¬ 
ertheless, there is at the heart of this old 
phrasing of the doctrine of the Trinity a 
truth from which we can never escape, 
namely, that fellowship is an affair of more 
than two and of at least three. To be sure, 
the third factor may be impersonal, but 
the fellowship of two depends for its full 
realization on the devotion of both to 
something outside themselves. Fellowship 
does not arise just out of the resolution of 
individuals or groups to be fellows one of 
another. Fellowship is a by-product, is¬ 
suing out of the devotion of persons or 
groups of persons to some common cause. 

This is obvious enough when we stop to 
think about it, and it becomes clearer the 
longer we think. Commonplace as the 
principle appears at first sight, it begins 
to reach out to far-ranging social implica¬ 
tions upon a little close examination. 

Take the institution which is thus far. 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


SI 


with all its faults, the outstanding achieve¬ 
ment of our race—the human family. John 
Fiske’s contribution to the doctrine of evo¬ 
lution consisted in showing the significance 
of the lengthening period of infancy for 
mankind. It is true that Fiske was not 
directly concerned with the thought to 
which I am now calling attention, but the 
idea which I have in mind fits har¬ 
moniously into his teaching—the idea, 
namely, that fellowship between husband 
and wife deepens into true marriage not 
with the direct attachment of husband 
and wife to each other merely, but with 
their absorption in their duties as father 
and mother. True love must always be 
the foundation of the home, but love be¬ 
comes not less but more true with the 
devotion to a common object of their in¬ 
terested affection. Hence that strange 
paradox which we so often find in married 
life—that the more love seeks to confine 
itself directly to husband and wife the 
more likely it is to vanish, and the more 
the two throw themselves together into a 
common task the more likely is their affec¬ 
tion for each other to deepen. Thus it 



LIVING TOGETHER 


32 

comes about that normally, with full al¬ 
lowance for the abnormal and exceptional, 
the home in which there are children is 
likely to be the scene of greatest affection 
between husband and wife. On the other 
hand, the childless home is always in 
danger unless the husband and wife find 
some cause into which they can together 
throw their united energies. 

These chapters of mine will to the casual 
reader seem at many points to be in con¬ 
tradiction to one another. In one place I 
say that marriage is contrived to help both 
men and women lead distinctive lives. I 
am not, however, in fundamental contra¬ 
diction with that when I say that marriage 
aims at partnership also of common effort. 
The modern movement toward separate 
careers for married women is commendable 
enough within limits, these limits being set 
by the necessity of both the man and the 
woman finding some cause in which they 
can work together. Love in courtship 
may grow with the direct attention of the 
lovers to each other. In married life it is 
more likely to grow with the devotion of 
both to a common task. 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


33 


The problem of living together comes 
down in the end to the formation of friend¬ 
ships, or, at least, of a friendly spirit. We 
must insist that the best friendships do 
not come from the direct attempt of peo¬ 
ple to be friendly to one another. There 
is indeed always need of our cultivation of 
the ability to take the other man’s point 
of view, but we must add to this that the 
highest friendship arises almost of itself 
out of devotion to common tasks. 

This indirectness of attainment of fel¬ 
lowship is a mark of the Christian system. 
It has been taught from the beginning that 
the chief path to knowledge of God is not 
the direct contemplation of God. Direct 
contemplation of God Christianity does 
indeed call for, but the main path is 
through doing the will of God. It will be 
remembered that at the close of the Ser¬ 
mon on the Mount Jesus tells us that the 
foundation under the superstructure of the 
Christian building is laid deep as men 
“do” their Master’s words. The appeal is 
to an activity of will which loses itself in 
the Christian task. On the foundation 
thus laid men attain to a certainty of con- 


34 


LIVING TOGETHER 


viction concerning religious truth, an aware¬ 
ness of the value of divine things, a keen¬ 
ness of spiritual insight which we have in 
mind when we talk of communion with 
God. There is indeed ample place for the 
man who starts out deliberately to be a 
friend of God, but the friendship will never 
get far just on a basis of standing still to 
contemplate God. Such contemplation is 
the essence of some heathen religions. 

It may seem to some that we have 
turned things around in trying to make 
friendship for God throw light upon friend¬ 
ship for men. We are, however, trying to 
look at this problem from the point of view 
of Christianity. Christian fellowship for 
one’s fellow is on the same plane as Chris¬ 
tian fellowship with God. We come into 
fellowship with God by working with God, 
and we come into fellowship with our fel¬ 
lows in working with them. If I am to 
work together with God, I start on the 
assumption that God understands me, and 
that I must understand him. Beyond that 
the deeper understanding comes out of de¬ 
votion to a common task. 

There are three distinct and progressive 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


35 


notes of emphasis in Christian experience. 
The first is one’s own consciousness of need 
of salvation. It would be folly in any way 
to minimize this. The saints have started 
on their saintly careers in this concern for 
themselves. The second note is that of 
emphasis on the service of our fellows. 
When this reaches such intensity of devo¬ 
tion to our fellow men that we no longer 
insistently raise the question as to our own 
spiritual state we are most genuinely saved 
ourselves. There is a third emphasis, 
namely, that on an increasing awareness of 
a divine plan in the world for which we 
should seek to work in cooperation with 
our fellows. This reaches out beyond the 
needs of any group with which we may be 
in immediate contact. In one sense it is 
impersonal, “a cause,” “a plan,” “a world 
scheme,” though it must always be inter¬ 
preted in personal terms. These three 
stages are, while intermingled beyond the 
drawing of sharp demarcations, neverthe¬ 
less separate phases of experience into 
which men come by processes of spiritual 
new birth. 

I am loath to leave this conception of 


36 


LIVING TOGETHER 


growth of fellowship through devotion to 
common tasks. How far do we get into 
fellowship with the man who is profes¬ 
sedly and openly trying to be a friend? 
The world, of course, needs such deliberate 
friendliness, but that is not the surest 
path to expression of the friendly spirit. 
Suppose a hostess bent on having her 
guests friendly to one another should wel¬ 
come a group of persons mutually strangers 
with a general exhortation to them all to 
get acquainted with one another. An 
evening spent after such an introduction 
as that to strangers would bore a normal 
person almost to suffocation. For mutual 
acquaintance-making there must be some¬ 
thing outside ourselves in which we can 
lose ourselves. That something may for 
the moment be trivial enough, or silly 
enough, but it serves the purpose of bring¬ 
ing us together on such terms that we are 
not thinking of ourselves. Self-conscious¬ 
ness will spoil anything from a social party 
to a campaign for the evangelization of 
the world. The spiritual excellences which 
call forth the admiring friendship of men 
do not come out of deliberate and purpose- 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


37 


ful striving. I have heard George Herbert 
Palmer tell of a dinner in Cambridge years 
ago at which the men then foremost in 
American letters were guests. Somehow 
the idea got about that these shining lights 
were expected to say things intentionally 
and purposefully brilliant. The lights, 
thus aroused to self-consciousness, paled 
into dimness and then feebly sputtered 
into darkness. There was no more bril¬ 
liancy than among a party of imbeciles. 
On the other hand, if anything could have 
made all present forget themselves in the 
discussion of a theme outside themselves, 
there would no doubt have been bright 
flashes enough. So with friendship, with 
comradeship, with saintliness. All arrive 
as something outside themselves is the 
chief aim. 

The more serious this common aim the 
deeper the fellowship. Airy nothings, 
trifles light as air, may do for the purely 
social event. Even skill in dancing, or 
proficiency in social conventional games, 
may act as the substitute for something 
more worth while with those whose mental 
resources are limited, though the friend- 


38 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ships founded on such bases are not to be 
taken with especial seriousness. Deeper 
comradeship begins where men take to 
“talking shop,” and deeper still when the 
life moves out in the direction of making 
the world safe for anything worth while. 

We shall return to this theme repeatedly 
throughout our discussion. We shall have 
much to say about getting together, but 
the getting together is to break away from 
the self-centered policies of any parties to 
the getting together. There is proceeding 
in almost all the larger social groups to-day 
a double movement, an intensification of 
the activities of the particular groups 
themselves and at the same time a trend 
toward larger federative connections. This 
is true in industrial, ecclesiastical, political 
relationships. The trade unions that lay 
the most stress on comradeship in their 
own crafts seek alliances with more in¬ 
clusive groups. The denominations that 
place the greatest emphasis on close com¬ 
munion reach out after some alliance with 
other denominations. The nations that 
stand most stiffly for self-determination 
call for a league of nations. There are 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


39 


many reasons for this. One is that each 
group instinctively feels that it may lose 
its own closeness of fellowship among its 
own members if it has not some consider¬ 
able outside contact to which those mem¬ 
bers may give themselves with at least a 
measure of self-abandonment. 


Granting all this to be true, what can 
the Christian do about it? He can at 
least call for a wider application of Chris¬ 
tianity. In what I said about evangelism 
in an earlier paragraph I was, of course, 
thinking of evangelism in the narrowly in¬ 
dividualistic sense. As I draw to the close 
of this first address I wish to say that a 
larger evangelism is the only solution of 
the problem before us. All the terms of 
which we so often make use in evangelistic 
appeal are in order in helping men to live 
together in the wider contacts. We need 
to get rid of sin, to repent, to be converted 
and born again; but we must put a richer 
content into the old terms. 

We know that it is the individual who is 
the only actual reality in the social organ¬ 
ism. The social gospel is a gospel for 



40 


LIVING TOGETHER 


individuals in social relationships. We are 
not asking an impersonal social organism 
to repent. We are asking individuals to 
repent, and to be born again in their social 
relationships. A man’s central purpose as 
an individual may be converted, but the 
conversion may not extend to his wider 
contacts. This does not imply hypocrisy. 
It means merely an imperfect work of 
grace, or, at least, an incomplete or un¬ 
enlightened work. 

The wider conversion calls first of all for 
the direct attack on the evils which make 
contacts between man and man harmful 
rather than helpful. Christianity does not, 
indeed, throw anything away; that is to 
say, Christianity never leaves an empty 
place. It does not destroy for the sake of 
destroying, but for the sake of fulfilling. 
Nevertheless, Christianity does directly at¬ 
tack evil. Just as a health officer fares 
forth positively to kill disease germs so 
Christianity wars on the germs of selfish¬ 
ness, of group selfishness as well as of 
individual selfishness. Christianity calls 
for collective repentance as soon as collec¬ 
tive evils are discovered. How can a man 


PRESUPPOSITIONS 


41 


repent for something of which he is not 
individually guilty? How can a man feel 
guilty of something which is the sin of 
thousands among whom he is just one? 
I don’t know. All I do know is that saints 
throughout all ages have thus felt guilty 
for the sins which men do collectively. To 
speak theologically, there is hardly a 
theory of atonement in the history of 
Christian doctrine that teaches that sin is 
only the sum of the individual sins of indi¬ 
vidual sinners. Almost every theory con¬ 
ceives of sin as not merely individual but 
also as collective. Sin binds men together 
as an evil net. In the older theories, it 
came down to men by descent and tainted 
them all. The provision in Christ was not 
only for individuals as distinct, but for 
men in their connection as members of a 
sin-cursed race. There is a large measure 
of social redemption which can come only 
as the prophets of God call upon people 
for repentance for collective sin. In such 
preaching the prophets are not making a 
departure from Christianity, but a return 
to it. 

Again, we need to be told to “turn,”, to 


42 


LIVING TOGETHER 


be converted in our social activities. Con¬ 
version, on the human side, is turning. It 
is possible for men, every one of whom has 
been converted in the narrower meaning, 
to be in their collective movement going 
in the wrong direction. We are like men 
on a ship—walking the deck toward the 
east while the boat itself is carrying us 
west. The need of repentance appears in 
the fact that if we all together choose to 
have it so, we can change the course of the 
ship. In some of our activities as mem¬ 
bers of groups and churches and nations 
and races we need to bring the boat 
squarely around. We are headed west 
when we should be headed east. Or if 
we are not headed dead wrong, we are 
enough off the course to be in peril our¬ 
selves and to be a peril to others. 

Once more, to keep close to the gospel 
phrase, we need to be “born again.” We 
have got so far away from some of those 
essentials of which I have been speaking, 
from regard for men as men, from the duty 
of dealing charitably with men as men, 
from the duty of seeking fellowship with 
men in cooperation in common tasks, that 



PRESUPPOSITIONS 43 

we need to be born again into a new world 
wherein dwelleth collective righteousness. 

Now, some men will say that new birth 
into a new world can only mean the de¬ 
struction of the present order. Such ob¬ 
jection forgets that I am talking about 
birth, which is a natural process, preceded 
by natural processes and leading out to 
life in which natural processes rule. Births 
are revolutionary only as life is revolu¬ 
tionary. Moreover, Christian birth is a 
birth in the spirit. Men in society need 
to be born into a new spirit. It is con¬ 
ceivable that in particular instances birth 
into a new spirit which makes possible 
better living together may not involve any 
inevitable change in what this or that 
man does. A fisherman born by conver¬ 
sion into the kingdom of God does not 
necessarily cease to be a fisherman. He 
ceases to be selfish, or cynical, or dishonest. 
A new spirit henceforth pervades all that 
he does. The change is at bottom in the 
realm of spirit, both with individuals and 
with groups. 

We must be born again. Even if the 
present social and political and interna- 


44 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tional order is all that its advocates claim 
for it, we need a new birth into the Divine 
Spirit if we are to live together as Chris¬ 
tians. If social systems are not all that 
their advocates claim for them, the neces¬ 
sary changes can best be made by those 
who have been born into newness of spirit. 
Industry, politics, governments need to be 
converted, born again, baptized by the 
Holy Spirit into newness of spirit. Men in 
all these various social activities—no mat¬ 
ter how high their attainments in personal 
character in the narrower individual circles 
—need to give heed to the age-old words 
of invitation to the Supper of the Lord, 
namely, that all those who are in love and 
charity with their neighbors and intend to 
lead a new life, following the command¬ 
ments of God and walking henceforth in 
his holy ways, should draw near with faith! 

When Jesus cried out in heart-broken 
pity over the Jerusalem that stoned the 
prophets and that turned away from him 
who would shelter her children against the 
eagles whose shadows were already falling 
around them, it is not to be imagined that 
he was thinking of unrelated dwellers in 



PRESUPPOSITIONS 


45 


Jerusalem, a census of separate and dis¬ 
tinct individuals. He was thinking of the 
dwellers in Jerusalem in the relations which 
filled them with that Jerusalem spirit 
which made the prophets’ lot a martyr¬ 
dom ; of the collective blindness which 
made Jerusalem, populated as it was with 
excellent, well-meaning individuals, a sym¬ 
bol for a society which as a society knew 
not the day of its visitation. 

May I urge again that reconciliation of 
groups must, however, always come back 
for its justification to the enlarged life of 
the individuals in the group. There will 
always be something of a paradox here: 
the more real the reconciliation the more 
each individual will stand for his own 
point of view; the closer men come to¬ 
gether the farther they will be apart; the 
wider the range of their group interests the 
more they will think of the persons closest 
to them. If reconciliation means that 
sentiment for humanity in general is to 
lessen the devotion to our friends and rela¬ 
tives and neighbors, we care not for it; 
but it does not mean that. It provides a 
basis for thoroughly Christian respect and 


46 


LIVING TOGETHER 


cooperation among men, but it does not 
mean that we are all to dabble in one 
another’s business, or to think thoughts 
that have everybody’s sanction, or to love 
everybody alike in the affectional sense. 
We do not have to make the world inane 
to make it Christian. 

To sum up: Enterprises looking toward 
genuinely Christian living together, espe¬ 
cially on the part of social groups, must 
keep in mind the absoluteness of human 
values, the relativity, so to speak, of human 
beings in native endowment and develop¬ 
ment, the need of absorption in various 
forms of cooperation which reveal the 
powers of individual men to themselves 
and to one another. 


II 

IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 

The church of the present day no sooner 
fares forth to teach men, as members of a 
society split up into diverse and opposed 
classes, nations, and races, the art of living 
together, than the critic cries out: “Set 
your own house in order. Religious groups 
have been the most quarrelsome groups in 
history. Religious debates have been more 
bitterly argued, religious wars more des¬ 
perately fought, religious persecution more 
unrelentingly pursued than any other de¬ 
bates or wars or persecutions. To-day the 
organized Christianity which preaches peace 
to the world is deeply cleft into hostile 
segments.” 

If the church is to do its part in helping 
men to live together, she will surely have 
to heed and deal with this criticism. It 
does not quite meet the case to say that 
the criticism is overdrawn. Most critics of 
the church are indeed out of touch with 

47 


48 


LIVING TOGETHER 


present day organized Christianity. It is 
simply not true that religious organizations 
are fighting among themselves. Still, we 
must admit that there is not anything 
which makes clear to the ordinary observer 
outside of the church the extent to which 
the various religious groups are succeeding 
in living together. We must pull the 
agreements among the religious groups into 
full view, not only for the enlightenment 
of the outsider but for the encouragement 
of ourselves. 

We may well be thankful that there are 
some general forces which to-day are bring¬ 
ing the religious groups together. First, 
and probably least important of all, is the 
emphasis on efficiency coming out of a 
time which talks much of results. Money 
is being wastefully spent in needless re¬ 
duplication of ecclesiastical and humani¬ 
tarian effort. The objection is not that too 
much is being spent, but that it is being 
spent wrongfully. Again, the pressing so¬ 
cial questions of our time cannot be at¬ 
tacked successfully by religious groups 
working separately. Social advance comes 
out of changes in the social climate, and 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 49 


climate must be more than what a wag 
called the climate of New England, a mere 
assortment of weathers. Again, the Great 
War has left Christianity badly discounted 
before the so-called non-Christian nations. 
If its missionary enterprise is to succeed as 
it should, the religious groups must so get 
together and work together as not to sug¬ 
gest to the non-Christian mind the thought 
of schism in Christianity. The sheer peril 
of failure confronting Christianity makes 
for church unity. 

There are other and deeper forces mak¬ 
ing for close friendliness. Think of the 
increasingly general agreement that, after 
all, the test of Christianity is the kind of 
life it produces. A good deal has been 
made of the deplorable ignorance of Amer¬ 
ican youth concerning the fundamentals of 
Christianity as that ignorance was revealed 
by examination of the millions of young 
men who enrolled in training for the Great 
War. There was, indeed, dense ignorance 
of the so-called doctrinal aspects of Chris¬ 
tianity and of the meaning of ecclesiastical 
differences, but there was surprising recog¬ 
nition of the fact that Christians are sup- 


50 


LIVING TOGETHER 


posed to act like Christ; not that there 
was ever a formal definition of what being 
like Christ is, but the standard was there 
nevertheless, and by that standard men 
were judged. The church has this to her 
outstanding credit, that, in spite of all her 
faults, she has driven into the common 
consciousness the understanding that Chris¬ 
tianity is likeness to Christ for men—and 
for God too for that matter. 

There is common recognition that Chris¬ 
tianity means likeness to Christ. The 
church, then, becomes a group of people at 
least seeking to serve the Christlike God by 
living the Christlike life. If this is true, 
the church as an organization of persons is 
the fundamental fact, and the church on 
the organizational side, the side of doc¬ 
trinal statement and organizational law, is 
instrumental. All these secondary features 
have to meet the Master’s own test, “By 
their fruits ye shall know them.” The 
doctrine, or the ritual, or the church code 
of laws, is the food upon which the Chris¬ 
tian lives, or the house in which he dwells, 
or the garment which keeps him warm, or 
the weapon with which he fights, or the 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 51 


tool with which he builds. All these go 
for final justification to the life of persons 
which they foster. 

This is not to disparage the instruments 
of religious life or the means of grace. As 
instruments they are of immense import¬ 
ance. We must not look on them as utterly 
essential to the life of the church, but 
essential as ministers to that life. We 
have high authority for saying that the 
life is more than meat and the body more 
than raiment, but the more important the 
life the more important the meat and the 
raiment. The phrasing of doctrinal state¬ 
ment takes on new significance when it is 
seen to be as important as food or tool. 

It is from this point of view that the 
study of doctrine must be approached, and 
only a flippant or shallow mind will ap¬ 
proach even doctrines which are no longer 
important with careless or jaunty step. 
A doctrine means for its time food or rai¬ 
ment or sword. It must be understood in 
connection with its time. The older cree- 
dal statements, no matter how positive 
their terms, do not all carry with them 
now the power to convince us that they are 


52 


LIVING TOGETHER 


absolute truth valid from the point of 
view of the Absolute. They were orig¬ 
inally statements in response to great 
popular demands, as the church met this 
or that particular crisis. How trifling the 
debate over Arianism seems to us now! 
The historians are probably right never¬ 
theless who tell us that the whole history 
of Christianity and the whole future of 
Christianity were involved in the debate. 
It at bottom seems to have been a ques¬ 
tion as to the supremacy of Christ in 
the life of the time. We debate the 
same question, but in entirely different 
terms. 

Put in this fashion, the problem as to 
religious argument changes. We are in¬ 
deed debating to get as near the truth as 
we can, only the truth is not truth just by 
itself. It is truth with a reference to vital 
spiritual needs. The question is as to what 
will happen to the man who puts on this 
truth as a garment, or lives in it, or takes 
it as food, or starts out to build a new life 
with it. Theology is well worth debating 
over, but always with that human aim in 
view. Its value is not absolute. The 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 53 


absolute value belongs to the people to 
whom it is to minister. 

I would not keep too close to a merely 
utilitarian plane. The ministry of doctrine 
is not as prosaic or coarse as some of my 
expressions may have implied. The mediae¬ 
val theologies have as companion master¬ 
pieces the mediaeval cathedrals. Think for 
a moment of the cathedral as the expres¬ 
sion of the religious spirit of the Middle 
Ages. It was a place of meeting for all the 
people of a village or town or city when 
they gave themselves to the worship of 
God. We marvel at the architectural skill 
of the building itself, which fitted it to its 
purpose. The old Romanesque churches 
lacked light. Their walls had to be so 
massive to carry the stone roofs that only 
small openings could be left for the light. 
Interiors were dark, and the church called 
for more light. Then by a miracle of 
builders’ skill the architects found a way 
to centralize the weight of the stone roof 
by ribs carried to mighty pillars or columns 
reenforced by buttresses, the weight some¬ 
times being carried over a side aisle by a 
flying buttress. Next the walls were 


54 


LIVING TOGETHER 


opened for the marvelous windows and the 
gorgeously colored light streamed in. The 
world of architecture has never seen a 
more complete solution of a substantially 
religious problem set by a given time than 
that of the Gothic cathedral. 

Now, I must not stop here. The minis¬ 
try of the cathedral did not stop short at 
supplying a meeting place for mediaeval 
worshipers. It not only served the more 
prosaic needs of the people, but it also fed 
their souls through the revelation of an in¬ 
expressible beauty—and feeds souls to-day. 

I stand by a French cathedral. Do I 
raise question as to the fitness of the cathe¬ 
dral merely as a meeting place? Do I 
complain that acoustic properties are not 
perfect, that there is no place for com¬ 
mittee or church activities so dear to the 
modern parish? No. While conceding 
that a church building reproducing the full 
Gothic proportions and qualities would 
hardly be built to-day, I nevertheless sit 
speechless in the cathedral over a beauty 
which builds upon stone till the stone it¬ 
self seems suffused with a timeless spiritual 
quality. 



IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 55 


So it is with the doctrinal statements of 
other days. Augustine and Anselm could 
not write, if they were here to-day, in the 
terms with which in their day they led the 
thinking of the church. The Nicene state¬ 
ment comes of the age in which it was 
written. Yet many a mind, alert even to 
the newest statement of the truth, finds in 
the Nicene phrase something that minis¬ 
ters to his sense of the greatness of God 
in Christ. We judge the creed by the reli¬ 
gious impact which it makes upon us. 

This recognition of the life in Christ as 
the main factor, of the community of 
Christians as the end in itself, makes 
powerfully for the closer approach of 
Christian groups to one another. Let 
every man find Christ, but let him find 
him in his own way. Let him make his 
closest associates, if he chooses, among 
those like-minded with himself. A man’s 
essential creed is the creed upon which 
he lives and which in turn comes out of 
his own life. 

If we but look at doctrinal statements in 
this vital way, we shall find the solution 
to some formal contradictions which look 


56 


LIVING TOGETHER 


formidable on paper. We all know how 
propositions which are formally incon¬ 
sistent with one another solve themselves, 
or, at least, get along together, in our 
personal experience. The age-old contra¬ 
dictions between the one and the many, 
between fixity and change, come nearest to 
solution in a life which knows itself to be 
one over against many, and which knows 
itself to be the same in the midst of change. 
So with the old, old debate as to free will 
and divine decree. The paradox is no¬ 
where more strongly put than in that 
scriptural passage which tells us to work 
out our own salvation, for it is God that 
worketh in us both to will and to do of his 
own good pleasure. Moreover, our wills 
are ours to make them his! 

There is danger, by the way, in over¬ 
haste to reconcile theological contradic¬ 
tions. Maybe the contradiction cannot be 
formally removed without doing harm to 
the truth stated in life terms, and it is 
with life terms that we are dealing. Even 
in the formal sense some contradictions 
are fruitful forces working for the progress 
of thought, forever insoluble and yet for- 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 57 


ever provoking to fresh revelation of the 
Truth. 

Is this recognition that the church deals 
primarily with the life of Christ in groups 
of his followers likely to bring us to some 
organization that will itself be a visible 
sign of the unity to which Christians are 
coming? Some such unity will surely come 
if the groups of Christians keep in mind 
two primary human characteristics never 
more clearly manifest than in social groups 
to-day—the desire for preservation of what¬ 
ever is spiritually distinctive in the sep¬ 
arate group lives on the one hand, and the 
desire for closer fellowship with all bodies 
of Christians on the other. I do not think 
this unity will ever come by any artificially 
efficient leveling process. We need the 
richness and fullness of variety and diver¬ 
sity in the kingdom of God. The one 
force that will at last bring us together will 
be a whole-hearted desire to spread the 
life of Christ among men. The one bond 
that will hold us together will be this 
desire joined to frank recognition of the 
legitimacy of all honest methods of seek¬ 
ing to further that main purpose. 


58 


LIVING TOGETHER 


In my Father’s house are many man¬ 
sions! Suppose we think of the church on 
earth as the vast home of the Father’s 
children. Union would then mean living 
under the same roof as members of the 
Father’s household. The rooms might be 
different. One might seem like a work¬ 
shop, another like a library, another like 
an art gallery, another like a debating 
room, another like a social hall. There 
would be as many rooms as there are 
broad and general human types, for all 
these diversities have to be preserved for 
the sake of the kingdom of heaven. 

Union is not helped on so much by the 
man who slackens his zeal for his religious 
group in the name of a loyalty for a general 
church, as by the man who seeks to make 
his group contribute distinctively to the 
Christian ideal at the same time that he 
increases his respect for all others in like 
groups who are working with a like aim. 
Paradoxical as it may sound, the man who 
is whole-heartedly loyal to his own group 
makes that group of such consequence 
everywhere that all other groups will de¬ 
sire union with it. Not every suitor wins 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 59 


his lady’s love by furiously definite and 
specific iteration of proposal for union. 
The most successful unions seem to come 
as each party to the union makes himself 
or herself worth having on his or her own 
account. 

Let us return again and again to the 
demand for diversity in the divine king¬ 
dom. Marriage itself is aimed not to make 
men to resemble women or women to 
resemble men. Marriage in the true sense 
makes men more masculine and women 
more feminine. On the basis of the most 
thorough merging of two lives each stands 
out at the end more distinct on its own 
account. Political unions, of the right sort, 
by making possible a sharing of effort that 
can be shared, have left the separate units 
free to follow their own impulses in their 
own affairs. Suppose all the States in the 
American Union were entirely independent 
of one another. We should then have over 
forty little standing armies, forty lines of 
custom houses, forty little national gov¬ 
ernments. The chief waste then would be 
in the diversion of effort from the things 
the people of the separate States could best 


60 


LIVING TOGETHER 


do separately. It is one of the possibilities 
of the American system that each State 
has some room for distinctive political ex¬ 
periment on its own account. So with reli¬ 
gious groups. If they could get near 
enough together to feel oneness at the 
same time that each tried to make its dis¬ 
tinctive contribution, we would have the 
ideal religious society. 

The differences between bodies of Chris¬ 
tians who have come close enough together 
to feel a common loyalty to Christ are not 
so much formal and creedal as tempera¬ 
mental. Men feel a lack of something 
once they find themselves outside of their 
own group. They do not feel at home. If 
we are to deal with the church as a union 
of groups of human beings, we must not 
neglect the importance of this feeling. We 
shall have to leave large liberty to men to 
do as they please and to find their way 
about in the Church of God. Let no man 
smile with any trace of superiority over 
the way another man—his brother—seizes 
life for his soul. A dear friend of mine 
used to find comfort in repeating ritualistic 
phrases that meant nothing to me. I won- 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 61 


dered at the strength they brought to him, 
until I remembered that they were on his 
father’s lips in the instruction of a happy 
childhood home and that his mother re¬ 
peated them as she died. If I am at hand 
when the new day of a united church 
comes, I hope that church will be of such a 
nature that I can be a Quaker in some 
moods, sitting silent to await the stirrings 
of the Spirit, and a ritualist in other moods, 
entering into a subtle communion with the 
souls of the past through the use of words 
dear to that past, and a crusader rejoicing 
in Christian conquest in other moods still, 
listening to stories of gains in great cities 
or in far away mission fields. 

Will such a glad day of union ever come? 
Why not? If we will continue to work 
together, to talk together, to pray to¬ 
gether, it will some day come as easily and 
naturally as the ripening of an orchard’s 
fruit. It will be upon us before we know 
it. The fruit must indeed not be plucked 
too soon, but the greater danger is in 
plucking it not soon enough. It is not 
wise husbandry which allows apples to fall 
from the trees. Changing the figure of 


62 


LIVING TOGETHER 


speech, union of churches is like marriage. 
Premature marriage is perilous, but wise 
lovers do not expect to settle everything 
before the wedding. By the fact that the 
two are married some agreements are nat¬ 
urally and easily reached which might be 
cause for endless debate before marriage. 

The critic is not yet through with us, 
however. He tells us that even after such 
a new day has dawned there are possibili¬ 
ties of quarrel and split in the church. He 
calls our attention to that warfare between 
radicals and «conservatives which has al¬ 
ways led to schisms in churches and which 
is especially grievous in some American 
religious groups to-day. Is not this dif¬ 
ference fundamental and inherent? Can 
the church ever present a peaceful front 
with this deep-seated human belligerency 
still marking the lives of church members? 
Meeting this question with the frankness 
it deserves, I do not see how we are ever 
to have a united church except upon the 
basis of a recognition of the place of both 
radical and conservative. It has been 
said that the test of the worth of a social¬ 
istic state, assuming one to come, would 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 6S 


be its willingness to have socialism pub¬ 
licly criticized. Would the state-owned 
press, for example, of a socialistic state be 
willing to print a book criticizing the so¬ 
cialistic state? When there is one church, 
will that one church allow the preaching of 
beliefs offensive to the majority of the 
church? Will the conservatives call radi¬ 
cals traitors and will the radicals retaliate 
by calling the conservatives mossbacks? 
That is the unfortunate terminology which 
the outside world hears to-day as it turns 
toward the church. 

All this must be kept on the human 
basis, and upon the platform of respect 
for every man who is seeking to live in the 
spirit of Christ. It is not to be assumed 
that any man who has taken on himself 
the vows of Christ will lightly violate 
those vows. By an odd chain of circum¬ 
stances my life in the Methodist ministry 
has brought me into close touch with the 
three or four Methodists in my day who 
have been called heretics. The sobering 
reflection that comes to me when I am 
tempted to call anybody a heretic is that 
these three or four men are those whose 


64 


LIVING TOGETHER 


memory I most cherish for the sheer saint¬ 
liness of their lives. It is a wise provision 
in some ecclesiastical bodies which pro¬ 
vides that a minister charged with heresy 
can be tried only by a group of fellow 
ministers to whose circle he immediately 
belongs. We cannot judge heretics apart 
from their lives. A church that names the 
name of Christ does not have the privilege 
of a club or a party to cast out those whom 
she disapproves. The worst calamity which 
could befall a church would be to vote so 
as to make the Christ-life practically a 
heresy. 

On the other hand, the conservative 
serves the kingdom of heaven by holding 
forth as long as he can a view that may 
be passing away. If we are to judge be¬ 
liefs by their usefulness, a belief may be 
useful long after masses of men have 
ceased to believe in it. It may still min¬ 
ister to some. In any case it may be 
presented with such force that the essen¬ 
tial truth in it is made to count. By op¬ 
posing the old to the new the conservative 
slows down the rush of a new idea, gives 
the church time to make its adjustment, 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 65 


compels the new forces to take the old 
force into itself, with a change of direction 
quite likely closer to the truth. If we can 
make place in the church to-day for rad¬ 
icals and conservatives to live together in 
good will though in wide intellectual dis¬ 
agreement, we shall have set before the 
world, puzzled as to how men can live 
together, an object lesson in living together 
of value for all social groups, industrial, 
national, and racial. 


All this is so general that we can rightly 
be expected to come to closer grips with 
the question of radicalism and conserva¬ 
tism in the churches. Let us not dodge 
the issue, as so many to-day are doing, by 
falling back upon a policy of silence con¬ 
cerning creedal or doctrinal questions. We 
must agree that formal doctrinal matters 
are secondary—that the important consid¬ 
eration is the type of life that follows the 
use of a doctrine. This does not mean, I 
repeat, that doctrines are not worth talk¬ 
ing about. Their instrumental nature 
makes them all the more worth talking 
about. If they were absolute truths, final 



66 


LIVING TOGETHER 


for all time, we might say that they were 
to be discussed only for purposes of under¬ 
standing and interpretation. There would 
be a limit to the discussion. It is not so 
with a doctrine which is spiritual food or 
raiment or tool. We seek to make the 
food more nutritious or palatable, the rai¬ 
ment warmer and better fitting, the tool 
sharper-edged by grinding it in discussion. 
The material progress of civilization meas¬ 
urably depends on finding better and better 
ways of cooking food and cutting garments 
and fashioning tools. So it is also in the 
shaping of instrumental statements of re¬ 
ligious truths. These should be brought 
forth for fullest discussion for the sake of 
their greater serviceableness. 

The advice is often given to young min¬ 
isters not to bring creedal or critical con¬ 
troversies into the pulpit. I have myself 
often given this advice. I have never 
meant, however, that these matters should 
not be brought into the church. The 
preaching service should indeed be re¬ 
served, I think, for the application of 
religious truth to conduct—or to the in¬ 
spiration of the life, or to the appeal for 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 67 


the surrender of the will to the rule of 
God. There should, however, be definite 
place for the discussion of theological and 
social issues. The charge can be made 
with pertinence and force that young 
preachers just coming out of theological 
school to-day follow one of two courses: 
they either lug the instruments by which 
newer views are arrived at into the pulpit, 
where there is little chance to guard them 
against possible misunderstandings, or they 
keep silent about these newer methods of 
approach altogether. In the one case the 
preacher is apt, sooner or later, to put on 
spiritual airs because of what he conceives 
of as his persecution as a martyr; in the 
other case he may pride himself on the 
fact that he is far advanced in his thinking 
without the people finding it out. Both 
courses are equally mistaken. The pulpit 
is not the place for controversial doctrinal 
discussion; but there should be abundant 
opportunity for such discussion in classes 
where the leader gives the best that is in 
him, with opportunity for questions from 
the class. Through the neglect of such 
discussion many churches now find them- 


68 


LIVING TOGETHER 


selves in a deplorable plight, with a laity 
untaught by the church, part of the laity 
falling back on the outworn theology of 
their childhood, and part following after 
newspaper and magazine and storybook 
phrasings of alleged newer truth. As for 
the discussion of social themes, these are 
best handled where there is most ample 
room for questions from the floor. It sets 
the right example before a society broken 
up into classes to behold the spectacle of a 
church ready, through its spokesmen, to 
meet and attempt to answer any questions 
which the man inside or outside wants 
answered, provided there is no attempt on 
the part of the church to say in oracular 
fashion just what men must believe, or to 
lay claim to positive knowledge beyond 
reach. Fundamental respect for the ques¬ 
tioner, fundamental respect for difference 
of opinion, fundamental loyalty to the 
highest and best for men—these are the 
essentials of a church which is to form a 
rallying point for the puzzled inquirers of 
our day. The church must make men see 
that she is utterly honest. 

Now the questions begin to come upon 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 69 


us thick and fast. What is ecclesiastical 
honesty? Well, honesty in public utter¬ 
ance is the aim to tell the people what one 
actually has in mind. If a man gives the 
impression that he is conservative—in the 
ordinary use of the term—when he is talking 
radicalism, we may well question his hon¬ 
esty. If he gives the impression of radical¬ 
ism when he is inwardly conservative we 
may likewise raise questions as to his 
honesty. Telling the truth is not just 
uttering words for our own sake. It is, 
indeed, permissible for a writer of books to 
state truth in terms that best suit himself. 
The printed page is before the reader, who 
has time to ponder over the book, to read 
and to re-read. Not so with the preacher 
or teacher. He is speaking with the aim 
of begetting understanding in the mind of 
the hearer. There are limits to all such 
understanding, but it is the business of the 
leader of religious thinking to do all he 
can to make himself understood. 

In this realm of religious discussion we 
cannot but be struck by the fact that de¬ 
baters do not always join issues, that they 
are wrangling about different problems, 


/ 



70 


LIVING TOGETHER 


that terms do not mean the same idea to 
both sides, that apparently explicit state¬ 
ments often mislead. 

To take a single instance. One debate 
before the church in our time has to do 
with the virgin birth. At first glance it 
looks as if the only way to answer the 
question: “Do you believe in the virgin 
birth?” is by a plain yes or no. More than 
that would seem to come of evil. There 
was or there was not a virgin birth. Jesus 
was born in that manner or he was not. 
So in plain honesty we have a right to call 
on the leader of the church to answer yes 
or no. 

Not so fast, please. That might do in a 
court of law where the sole aim is to estab¬ 
lish an objective fact, but there is a dif¬ 
ference when we are in the realm of 
religious discussion. In that realm “virgin 
birth” means more than an objective fact. 
Through long years of doctrinal debate 
certain implications have become almost 
inseparable from the term. So that when 
the theologian is asked to answer yes or 
no he may hesitate, not because he is dis¬ 
honest but because he is honest. He does 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 71 


not wish to give a false impression by his 
yes or no. He sees that if he honestly says 
yes, he is thought by many good people to 
be taking a stand on a theory of the incar¬ 
nation and to be committing himself to 
one particular mode of incarnation. If he 
honestly says no, he is thought by multi¬ 
tudes of surpassingly good people to be 
denying the divinity or deity of our Lord 
—which is farthest from his intention. Of 
course, he must not say yes when he means 
no; but he must not be suspected of inner 
disloyalty or insincerity when he hesitates, 
or, as a legislator would say, asks for “per¬ 
mission to explain his vote.” Many of us 
have never had any particular difficulty in 
accepting the creedal statement, but we 
have accepted it because the statement 
seems to fit harmoniously into the unique¬ 
ness of a work like that of the incarnation. 
We may hold a conception of the relation 
of God to the universe which does not 
make it hard for us to accept miracle, if 
miracle seems worth while. Others, just 
as devoted as we are, think of miracle, not 
as impossible because impersonal laws rule 
everything, but improbable because the 


72 


LIVING TOGETHER 


laws are expression of divine wisdom and 
are not to be set aside. 

I dwell upon this matter of honesty be¬ 
cause I believe that the church as the 
agent of reconciliation among men must be 
entirely honest herself. There is no worthy 
reconciliation except on a basis of entire 
frankness. Yet I know that, after all is 
said and done, there are certain phases of 
religious truth that seem foolishness to the 
man outside. They are foolishness as a 
masterpiece of art is foolish to him who 
has no artistic sense; foolishness as regard 
for propriety is foolish to him who has no 
feeling of propriety; foolishness as moral 
revelation of the finer grades is foolish to 
him whose morality is of the coarser, more 
conventional variety. 

What are now the essentials of the task 
before the churches in which all can unite 
on a basis which will bring them into the 
truest fellowship? May I say at the out¬ 
set that the preaching of a positive Chris¬ 
tianity is quite likely at least in the 
beginning to deepen the divisions between 
men. The effort toward the reconciliation 
of men moves often through such definite 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 73 


and dynamic statement of the truth that 
it may force men to take opposing sides. 
We more and more agree that Christianity 
is Christ, that Christ is the final word 
about God and about men and about the 
universe. If that is true, how can we put 
the truth so as not to cause division? 
Christ is the final truth about men in all 
walks of life, in all employments, in all 
nations, in all races. The preaching of 
such a Christ is bound to make trouble. 

What a miserable caricature of Chris¬ 
tianity it is that interprets the life of the 
church in terms of a smiling, happy, social 
feast in which everybody is having a good 
time! This weary world needs good times 
sadly enough, but such peace is not quite 
the peace of the church. The church is 
here to pose hard questions to herself and 
to the world. Ought the human beings 
about whom Christ is the final word be 
treated as they are in some industrial, na¬ 
tional, and racial situations? I shall say 
later that quite possibly the church can 
never herself solve the greater questions 
by expedients of her own devising, but if 
she just keeps raising the question inces- 


74 


LIVING TOGETHER 


santly, “Does this, or that, harmonize with 
the Christ-ideal for men?” she will per¬ 
form an immense social service. It may 
well be that some forms of persecution will 
follow such persistent questioning, but per¬ 
secution has always meant cement for a 
united church. If the churches together 
will bear witness to Christ, first by raising 
the questions I have suggested, I repeat, 
the world will soon forget the divisions of 
the church in the face of such unity. What 
was the value of the Greeks to philosophy, 
taking the whole course of the world’s 
thinking together? In that the Greeks 
formed great philosophical systems? That 
the Greeks framed such systems we all 
gratefully acknowledge. The main service 
of the Greeks, however, was in the fact 
that they put certain questions which men 
have been debating about and dividing 
about ever since. So likewise the glory of 
the church is that she puts some questions 
insistently age after age. She should be 
the sharp, divisive questioner of every age. 

A sign of the increasing unity of the 
church is to be found in her insisting that 
her questions be answered now. That is 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 75 


to say, all the churches are alike coming to 
see that this present earth is the place 
where the searching questions about the 
realization of the Christ-ideal are to be 
answered. God be thanked for the hope 
of immortality, but that hope is not 
merely a solace as we think of redressing in 
another life the wrongs given and received 
here. Immortality implies such readjust¬ 
ment, we all know, but immortality, after 
all, is held fast to as a sphere for the un¬ 
folding of the Christ-possibilities in men. 
That unfolding should start here. Only 
those can be trusted in a redeemed society 
in another life who are willing to try to 
redeem society here. 

The Christian ideal of a redeemed so¬ 
ciety in the future life has always contained 
elements which nobody could preach as ap¬ 
plicable on earth without being in danger 
of being looked upon as a disturber of the 
public order. I am not a socialist, but I 
would not care to hear any preacher tell 
me that there is to be any considerable 
private ownership of material things in the 
immortal life. In fact, I do not remember 
ever to have heard any such doctrine. We 


76 


LIVING TOGETHER 


all concede that in a world of redeemed 
humanity in the skies there would not be 
any place for armies or for compulsion by 
force. Well, even admitting that the 
heavenly condition is a long way off from 
any earthly fulfillment—the churches are 
more and more agreeing that the sooner 
we get started to introduce the kingdom of 
God here the more chance there is of hop¬ 
ing for a worth-while kingdom of God 
yonder. 

The reader will see that 1 am keeping 
this statement general. I am not advo¬ 
cating specific and detailed reforms. In a 
later chapter I shall say something of the 
limitations of the church in putting into 
effect specific reforms. I am merely try¬ 
ing to keep the attention fast on those 
things in which we can lose ourselves, and 
can thus find ourselves brought more and 
more closely together almost without our 
being aware of the nearer approach. We 
can raise the Christly question, we can 
call for an answer here and now. More 
than that: we can, without yielding any 
denominational essentials, insist upon the 




IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 77 


contrasts between the Christ-method and 
the methods of this world, the Christ- 
method being the overcoming of evil with 
good by the sheer attractiveness of the 
good. 

Contrast the first is that between the 
Christ-method and the world’s reliance on 
force. Everybody concedes the imperfect 
nature of even the best human beings. We 
may admit that there are many men of 
such predominantly physical nature that 
all they seem to understand is a physical 
contact. We are not asking that mun¬ 
dane society disband the police force. Still, 
we do not hear so much as formerly about 
the potency of the discipline of force in 
the family. Nor do we believe that cor¬ 
poral punishment helps slow minds in the 
schools to quicken their pace. I remember 
a well-meaning teacher who once shook me, 
for some stupidity, so hard that for half a 
day every object before my eyes had a 
hazy, fuzzy edge. I have never felt that 
her method helped to sharpness of discern¬ 
ment, no matter how just the punishment 
so far as my deserts were concerned. 
Again, we have seen the emphasis in the 


78 


LIVING TOGETHER 


treatment of prisoners tend away from 
force. Without saying how far the move¬ 
ment against the control of human beings 
by force should go, is it not clear that 
churches can stand together for the teach¬ 
ing of Jesus as to the true method of con¬ 
trolling men? The conquest of war, we 
repeatedly insist, is the immediate task of 
present-day Christianity. War is a form 
of materialistic atheism—the common foe 
of all beliefs in God. 

Secondly, the churches should stand to¬ 
gether against the spiritually harmful com¬ 
pulsions which come out of the pressure of 
economic or financial powers. I am not 
now speaking directly of what the radical 
calls “wage-slavery,” but of the extent to 
which fear of loss of financial support will 
affect the preaching and teaching of the 
church. Preaching and teaching mean 
training of preachers and teachers, and 
such training is expensive. The church 
must have money, but must never yield to 
the dictates of the givers of money. I 
gladly admit that the possibility of the 
control of teaching especially by the 
wishes of donors is often overstated. Mr. 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 79 


Bertrand Russell recently averred that 
such colleges and universities in America 
as have received money from the Standard 
Oil Company can be looked upon as in the 
pay of that company, and that they can 
be depended upon never to say anything 
inimical to Standard-Oil interests. This 
statement partakes of Russell’s character¬ 
istic fondness for the extreme. The Uni¬ 
versity of Chicago, which has been a nota¬ 
ble object of Rockefeller generosity, has 
from the beginning taught progressive 
social theories, some of which, if practi¬ 
cally applied, would prevent the profits 
of great monopolies from going into pri¬ 
vate pockets. Few universities will accept 
gifts with outright provisions that limit 
freedom of speech. 

Still, the peril is real and the churches 
must unitedly stand against it. If a man 
gives money to a church or school, he must 
keep hands off. It must be borne in mind 
that men of immense financial means may 
not be men of immense social understand¬ 
ing. In America we make the easy mistake 
of often thinking that a man who is an 
authority in industry is an authority on 


80 


LIVING TOGETHER 


social concerns. He may not be. He 
may honestly believe that the system on 
which he has been brought up and made 
rich is sacred, while it may be the reverse 
of sacred. Either Christianity must be 
left free to use its moneys without fear of 
the money givers or it must return to com¬ 
plete, almost poverty-stricken simplicity. 
Better have a whole truth uttered by a 
church whose preachers tramp the road¬ 
sides, than a half-truth uttered from a 
church under the domination of the forces 
of this world. The churches can succeed 
against the materialism of the money 
standard and money control only by a 
united uncompromising insistence upon a 
spiritual ideal. 

Once more, the church has to stand 
against another massive force, upon occa¬ 
sion almost a brute force. That is the force 
of a public opinion which at times rides 
down everything which may happen to be 
in opposition to itself. For public opinion 
of the enlightened order the church has 
only approval. The formation of such 
opinion is the main reliance of the church 
in the redemption of society. Public 


81 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 

opinion unenlightened, selfish, headstrong 
in its fury, is one of the worst obstacles to 
the advance of righteousness. 

Here, then, are three campaigns which 
call for the united effort of all the churches, 
none of them requiring any surrender by 
the churches of any denominational loy¬ 
alty : the conflict with the forces of physical 
might, conflict with the forces arising from 
control of the material goods of this world, 
the conflict with a public opinion at times 
the expression of animal and mob instincts. 
These three constitute a veritable triune 
anti-Christ whose overthrow will require 
all the power of the church. Moreover, 
victory can finally come only at the cost of 
an effort at religious education which shall 
seize the growing minds of successive gen¬ 
erations so firmly and thoroughly as to 
amount virtually to a making-over of 
human nature. In the presence of a task 
of such sheer magnitude and appalling 
difficulty any serious cherishing of tradi¬ 
tional and divisive group peculiarities indi¬ 
cates an utter obliviousness to what the 
very name “Christian” means. 


82 


LIVING TOGETHER 


In earlier pages I have spoken of per¬ 
sonal evangelism in terms that suggest 
lack of confidence in that evangelism. My 
lack of confidence applies to an individual 
evangelism too narrowly conceived. I want 
evangelism to begin with earliest child¬ 
hood and spread to all parts of human 
nature. The individual always has to 
stand at the center of any social evan¬ 
gelism. If I may do so without presump¬ 
tion, may I say that the phase of the gospel 
which should to-day be most earnestly 
preached to individuals is emphasis on 
reconciliation and communion as the wit¬ 
ness of the Spirit present in human society. 
Anything that can to-day—even in the 
narrowest relationship—set before the 
world a picture or a hint of reconciliation 
is socially most valuable. If thou bring 
thy gift to the altar and there remember 
that thy brother hath aught against thee, 
first go and be reconciled to thy brother 
and then come and offer thy gift. This is 
of the essence of the gospel. Such a gospel 
does not mean that we are to love all men 
alike in the emotional sense, but it does 
mean that we are to bear toward all men a 




IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 83 


spirit of good will and a willingness to 
merge ourselves in groups. Jesus felt that 
men could not get close to God if any 
obstacles kept them apart from one an¬ 
other. We are to forgive debts—the pas¬ 
sage seems to have in mind debts given to 
help need—because the existence of the 
debt keeps men apart. The individual 
gospel, if it gets as far as the creation of a 
spirit of reconciliation among men of any 
circle, teaches the gospel lesson to an out¬ 
side world in danger of falling to pieces 
through men’s inability to live together. 
To secure the individual blessing of Divine 
Life—according to the teaching of Jesus— 
this immediate social duty of reconciliation 
with a brother must be discharged. Yet 
the task here, we repeat, calls for such 
focusing and economy of spiritual force as 
to leave no justifiable place for any group 
loyalties which would subtract an ounce of 
power from the main purpose. 

To make clear to a world perishing for 
the lack of a spirit of reconciliation the im¬ 
portance of adjustments which bring men 
together the Protestant churches should 
forthwith proceed to some form of federa- 



84 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tion among themselves which will make 
them practically a unit. To say that the 
mind of the church is not equal to a step 
which will organize into expression the 
measure of unity which already exists is 
to admit that the mind of the church, or, 
rather, the collective intelligence of the 
Protestant churches, is not equal to a task 
already performed by the British Empire, 
by the Standard Oil Company, and by the 
Roman Catholic Church, each of which 
organizations permits as much diversity as 
the diverse Protestant sects now need and 
yet centralizes for the tasks which only 
centralization can accomplish. 

It is the duty of the churches to remem¬ 
ber that a church in these days is to be 
Christian. In a Methodist General Con¬ 
ference I once knew a good brother to 
insist upon asking a creed subscription of 
candidates for membership on the ground 
that any organization has a right to define 
the terms of admission to its own ranks. 
“Do not the clubs to which I belong,” he 
asked, “lay down terms for admission?” 
Unfortunately for this argument the church 
is not a club. The instant we use the term 


IS CHURCH UNITY POSSIBLE? 85 


“church,” with the suggestion of Chris¬ 
tianity, at least, we are estopped from lay¬ 
ing down any terms except those which 
we believe the Lord Jesus would accept 
and approve. That the Lord Jesus would 
aim at diversity of Christian experience 
and practice we all believe,—that he would 
approve of diversity’s preventing substan¬ 
tial union here and now into one fold we 
can never believe. The substantial union 
would enrich any diversity worthy to be 
called Christian. 



m 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 

In considering what Labor has a right 
to expect of the church we must remember 
at the outset that the church is supposed 
to set before the world a human ideal so 
high that in practice she can never expect 
fully to overtake it. Whether or not an 
outsider accepts for himself the thought of 
the church concerning God, he has a right 
to insist that a church holding to the Chris¬ 
tian idea that God is like Christ is by that 
very profession under the heaviest obliga¬ 
tion to be loyal to the Christ idea of man. 

There is an immeasurably heavier re¬ 
sponsibility upon the church in its relation 
to men than upon any other human or¬ 
ganization. Let us suppose an organiza¬ 
tion for the relief of men at some particular 
pinch of distress, a society for the relief of 
sufferers in famine-ridden or plague- 
stricken districts. Such a society may suc¬ 
ceed altogether in preventing death by 

86 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 87 


starvation or in wiping out a plague. As 
far as we can say that anything human is 
done perfectly, we may say that the work 
of such an organization is done perfectly. 
The ideal is a limited ideal. When we are 
dealing with the church, however, we have 
to do not with a limited and specific ob¬ 
ject. We have to recognize the responsi¬ 
bility of the church to aid everything that 
means larger and finer human life, and such 
an ideal never can be fully realized. Even 
if we satisfy a given round of human needs, 
new needs forthwith emerge, and the goal 
seems as far off as ever. The impossibility 
of catching up with the ideal is a part of 
the glory of Christianity on the one hand, 
and a reason for constant urging and 
prodding of Christianity on the other. 

We repeat that the profession of belief 
in a Christ-like God puts heavier obliga¬ 
tions upon the church than upon a merely 
humanitarian organization which does not 
avow such belief. Let us think of a group 
of men whose religious views are agnostic. 
So far as they know, man is a creature of 
the moment. He lives a little while and 
goes. There is no reason to believe that 


88 


LIVING TOGETHER 


he is an object of especial concern to any 
power back of the universe, no reason to 
think that his life reaches beyond the 
grave. Since his life is so brief and so 
hard at best, let us work with all our might 
to make the days of men between the 
cradle and the grave as happy as possible. 
There is no use denying that many, many 
holders of such a creed as this labor un¬ 
selfishly for men. They are filled with the 
Christ spirit even though they do not call 
themselves by the Christ name. All I am 
trying to say is that the holders of such 
creeds are not by their creeds under such 
obligation to serve their fellow men as are 
the holders of the belief in the Christ-like 
God. If the Christian is to take his belief 
in God seriously, he must be utterly un¬ 
remitting in the service of his fellow men. 
There can be no discharge in the war in 
their behalf, no letting down in the effort 
to help men. 

The situation for the church is made 
further difficult by the fact that though 
her head rises among the loftiest human 
ideals, her feet are firmly caught in the 
earth. Professing the noblest ideals for 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 89 


men, she has to adjust herself to an indus¬ 
trial and social situation which at the best 
largely contradicts those ideals. Her peo¬ 
ple have to make their living. They earn, 
invest, and spend money. If the money is 
legally earned, invested, and spent there is 
no question as to the possibility of a church 
member’s holding his place in the church 
fellowship. Are legal ways of using money, 
however, necessarily Christian? Here we 
come upon the contradiction between ideal 
and practice. It is manifest that the 
church cannot lower the ideal. If she does, 
she ceases to be a Christian Church, though 
she might conceivably become a worthy 
and useful social organization of more lim¬ 
ited aim. Now, let it be remembered that 
no matter how far the church falls short of 
her ideal for human contacts, the ideal is 
nevertheless there. No matter how far the 
church is the outcome and expression of a 
capitalistic bourgeois era, for example, she 
never loses sight of the ideal altogether. 
Furthermore, at certain periods of the Mid¬ 
dle Ages the church herself was one of the 
largest, perhaps the largest, property holder 
in European society. From the moment 


90 


LIVING TOGETHER 


the church became the official Church of 
Rome, compromises with the spirit of this 
world became inevitable. Neither political 
nor financial compromises, however, pre¬ 
vented the human ideal of Christianity 
from making its course with increasing 
effectiveness out into human society. There 
was far more actual human brotherhood 
than we realize. Moreover, the church al¬ 
ways allows to a marvelous degree criti¬ 
cism of herself by her own members. I 
think we have here a social phenomenon of 
no small proportion. I do not know any 
other social institution which allows such 
open, public proclamation of its own faults 
by its own members as does the church. 
Other organizations, indeed, talk over their 
faults among themselves, but the church 
probably leads all social groups in tol¬ 
erating public criticism of herself by her 
own people. Underneath this there is in 
the mind of the churchmen who think at 
all the realization that the ideal is far, far 
ahead, and that any criticism which stings 
the church to more rapid progress is worth 
while. 

I think I have put the case for the 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 91 


church with substantial fairness. She is 
the holder of an ideal of human relation¬ 
ships which will gleam far ahead of society 
hundreds and hundreds of years from now, 
when schemes that to-day seem Utopian 
will be cast out as reactionary and obso¬ 
lete. She cannot live up to her own ideal. 
Since she cannot surrender the ideal with¬ 
out surrendering her own life, there is but 
one course open to her—to accept and 
profit by every stimulus from every , 
quarter. Agitators within and without her 
membership are veritable means of grace. 

The church is more and more listening to 
criticism of herself from industrial and so¬ 
cial groups. The criticisms at the very 
points I have mentioned are sinking in, 
the responsibility of the church to hold to 
the belief in a Christ-like God, and the 
actual entanglement of the church in the 
affairs of the world. It will be a sad day 
for the church when the leaders of the 
labor groups cease to rub these sensitive 
spots. These are the sore places, and 
criticism should never cease. I repeat that 
even the man who is atheist or agnostic 
has a right to call upon the church for in- 



92 


LIVING TOGETHER 


creasing loyalty to her own ideal. In the 
name of Christ a man who does not take 
upon himself the name of Christian has a 
right to call out as to the contradiction 
between the ideals and practices of the 
church. The contradiction is there. It 
will always be there. The only condition 
on which it can be there safely is by open 
recognition leading to constant and deep¬ 
ening repentance and consecration on the 
part of the church itself. Especially should 
the entanglement of the church in the proc¬ 
esses by which its members make money 
always be kept out in the full light. All 
this makes for humility out of which 
spiritual progress comes. A boastful 
church makes no progress. A complacent 
church is already dead. 

So, then, let leaders of industrial groups 
who feel that the church is not fair to the 
working masses take their part in holding 
before the church the ideal of the church 
itself. 

Can a church that preaches the Christ 
ideal both for man and God sit quietly by 
while great basic industries demand a 
twelve-hour day for heavy manual labor? 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 


93 


Can such a church sanction the efforts to 
deprive men of all right to have some 
voice in the conditions governing their own 
employment, a voice expressed in union 
with their fellows and through representa¬ 
tives of their own choosing? 

I keep harking back to this fundamental 
emphasis on the ideal because that is the 
point of labor’s effective contact with the 
church. Labor will deprive itself of most 
important aid from the church if it begins 
to ask that the church be a definitely lim¬ 
ited social propaganda agency or institution 
for the direct relief of laborers in any sort 
of distress. All such work the church 
should no doubt aid, but always in the 
name of the fundamental ideal of the 
church. If labor can help hold the church 
to the proclamation of the Christ ideal, it 
will render signal service. Suppose the 
most of the attendants of the ordinary 
church are bourgeois in their point of view. 
Are there not preachers of the gospel 
to-day who are doing more than any other 
agencies to introduce to the bourgeois lay¬ 
man those wider ideas of human equality 



94 


LIVING TOGETHER 


on which we must advance toward indus¬ 
trial democracy? The church is always 
colored by the economic life of the time, 
but the church always has at least some 
preachers who point out the fact and peril 
of that coloring. 

One handicap on the part of the church 
to-day in dealing with industrial and social 
questions is the difficulty, for anyone out¬ 
side the industrial groups, of getting hold 
of the facts as they are in the concrete. 
We are all—church circles, labor circles, 
capitalistic circles—caught in manias for 
propaganda. We do not ask as to what 
the facts are, but as to what the facts can 
be made to show for our side. Now, a 
church which professes to serve Christ 
cannot be Christian and be indifferent to 
the point of view of men by the million 
who are by labor earning their daily bread. 
The church needs to know how the labor¬ 
ing groups state their own thoughts and 
feelings, but she needs above all to know 
the facts about the way men live, and 
about their chances to get anything like 
adequate conditions of existence. 

Will the critic of the ignorance of the 



THE CHURCH AND LABOR 95 


church as to social matters please con¬ 
sider for just a moment the plight of the 
churchman who tries to get at social facts? 
Our first thought is likely to be that all 
one has to do to get facts as to labor is 
to read the newspapers. In reality, the 
newspapers are nearly useless in such mat¬ 
ters. They can publish the list of casual¬ 
ties in a labor conflict, but they cannot 
tell the point of view of the laborer. It 
requires far more training to do this than 
the ordinary reporter has. Such a reporter 
can no more report a labor meeting ade¬ 
quately than he can report a religious 
assembly or a scientific convention. We 
turn then to the scientific expert. The 
expert can, indeed, help us to a certain 
type of objective fact, but he is so obsessed 
with a craze for scientific balance and im¬ 
partiality—paradoxical as the expression 
sounds—that he often fails to see straight 
in an atmosphere charged with human feel¬ 
ing; that too in a situation where human 
feeling is the most determining factor. I 
once had a scientific expert protest against 
some statements I had made about the 
misuse of State constabulary in mill-cities 



96 


LIVING TOGETHER 


during strikes, telling me how safe it was 
for defenseless farmers to live on roads 
patrolled by State police. All I was asking 
was that the police limit themselves to 
their proper duties of keeping the country 
roads safe. Some scientifically minded so¬ 
cial students are so fearful of positive 
unqualified statements that their deliver¬ 
ances are utterly unscientific. 

The only way for the outsider to get the 
facts is to urge members of industrial 
groups to speak up and insist upon being 
heard, speaking in the name of fact. No 
matter how much bias the members of the 
industrial group may have, they can tell 
their own story as no one else can tell it 
for them. If there could be in labor utter¬ 
ances less denunciation and more plain 
statement, we should all get along much 
faster. It is the business of the church to 
get the facts, but they cannot be got with¬ 
out the help of the labor groups themselves. 

I don’t see how the aid of labor to the 
church can stop short of labor’s coming to 
the inside of the church. It is almost im¬ 
possible to write like this without seeming 
to show a desire to win converts to the 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 97 


church as an organization. I am not urging 
labor groups to come forward to the altar 
rails of churches now filled by a non-labor 
class and join such churches. Suppose, 
though, we look at it all from another 
angle. Suppose the labor leader to be 
actuated by a genuinely Christian ideal. 
Suppose his life is given to unselfish serv¬ 
ice. Why should he not be able, with the 
possibilities of framing statements of belief 
open to congregations to-day, to establish 
religious centers among laborers, led, if 
need be, by the laborers themselves? The 
church to-day is so anxious for unity that 
once such centers were established, the 
congregations elsewhere would have to 
heed their statements of religious ideals. 
The laborers claim to be followers of Christ 
—even though they are outside of the 
church. If they are followers of Christ, 
why can they not organize that fact into a 
Christian organization? Let the organiza¬ 
tion stand at first outside of all relationship 
to other ecclesiastical organizations, until 
mutual fear and suspicion can be over¬ 
come. Let the labor groups adopt any 
rules they please to guard their organiza- 



98 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tions from any sort of “upper-” or 4 'middle- 
class” control. If this could be done the 
whole temper of organized religion toward 
the working classes would soon change. 
Considering the unwillingness of labor 
groups to come into the church, it is re¬ 
markable that labor sentiment is as well 
represented in the church as it is. 

Of course, the working class would have 
to give up some things sooner or later if 
such labor churches were established. The 
materialistic interpretation of history, for 
one thing, would have to go by the board. 
By the way, one of the oddest phenomena 
in the history of thought has been the ex¬ 
tent to which that materialistic interpreta¬ 
tion has been debated with spiritual fervor. 
Men have showed by their spiritual devo¬ 
tion to a materialistic idea that they have 
not been materialistically minded. Men 
have unselfishly fought for a theory on the 
face of it selfish. Just as the churchman 
has at times fought with carnal selfishness 
for a spiritual ideal, so the social leader has 
at times fought with rare spiritual conse¬ 
cration for a materialistic ideal. So with 
class conflict, as often held. The doctrine 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 99 


of class conflict can be stated in Christian 
terms as condemnation of any class of 
idlers, but as stated in the orthodox 
Marxian terms it is not Christian. This 
doctrine, as socialistically stated, would 
sooner or later have to go, but not by the 
say-so of anyone outside. Let a labor 
church start at first with a laborer’s Christ. 
We could trust both labor and the Christ 
soon to advance to a Christ of all men. 

If laboring groups will not come into 
churches now in existence or form churches 
after patterns of their own, all we can do 
is to keep on talking about ways of bring¬ 
ing churches and industrial groups to bet¬ 
ter mutual understanding. 

It might help on toward such under¬ 
standing if the church were encouraged to 
state the human ideal, of which we have 
spoken so much, in more and more con¬ 
crete terms. There is one common mistake 
under which many a preacher takes shelter 
when he is asked his opinion about a 
definite and specific human situation in 
industry—the mistake that the gospel 
proclaims general and abstract principles 


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> j 
9 


> 1 



100 


LIVING TOGETHER 


which will in the end work their own way 
out into expression in society, and that the 
duty of the preacher stops with the ab¬ 
stract utterance. If I read the Scriptures 
aright, they do indeed announce principles, 
but they do not state them abstractly. 
The beginning of the movement of Israel 
toward emphasis on the worth of human 
life was not in abstract terms, but in 
specific insights. The prophets announced 
fundamental social principles indeed, but 
they phrased them in denunciations of 
those who laid house to house and land to 
land till there was no place left for the 
poor. They talked of bowls of strong 
drink and of ivory couches, of women who 
affected mincing steps and who did their 
hair up on round tires like the moon. One 
prophet even referred to such women as 
the kine of Bashan. Language like this is 
not abstract. Nor was Jesus abstract in 
treating evils of his day. He did not in¬ 
deed attack capitalism as such, but cap¬ 
italism in its present form did not exist 
then. He attacked the vested interests, 
for example, that had to do with the con¬ 
trol of the Temple, and managed to get a 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 101 


good many concrete things said in the 
attack. I have often thought how easy it 
would have been for Jesus to say all that 
he said against the high priests and Scribes 
and Pharisees without offending them. If 
the words of Jesus in a famous passage in 
Matthew had been turned over for editing 
to some lover of the abstract, everything 
which Jesus said could have been preserved 
in an abstract utterance which would have 
hurt nobody. Put the references to whited 
sepulchres, binding men’s shoulders with 
burdens grievous to be borne, devouring 
widows’ houses, in abstract terms and they 
can be quite pleasantly stated. The prin¬ 
ciples of Jesus, however, have to be seized 
in the concrete statement which he gave 
them in his time and to be restated in con¬ 
crete terms fitting our own day. 

Labor is right and just in expecting that 
the church state to-day in living terms the 
ideals of Jesus with such effectiveness as to 
make social injustice impossible. Labor 
cannot expect the church herself to tell in 
detail just how the ideals of Jesus are to be 
wrought out in rule or code or custom. 
That is a duty of technicians. When the 


102 


LIVING TOGETHER 


demand gets strong enough in modern life 
for the removal of social abuses, the abuses 
will go. When the general public senti¬ 
ment gets strong enough to demand the 
grant of further powers to laboring groups, 
the powers will be granted. There is noth¬ 
ing inherently impossible about putting 
heavy labor in continuous processes in 
basic industries on an eight-hour shift, 
nothing impossible in granting groups of 
laborers the right to organize for larger 
control of the conditions under which they 
do their work, nothing impossible in at 
least listening to anything that labor has 
to say. The employing classes boast of 
their large control over managing ability. 
The managing ability will one day show 
itself socially worthy of the admittedly high 
remuneration which it receives by working 
out plans which will make possible the 
realization of some of the above changes. 
Public opinion will be the determining fac¬ 
tor. When public opinion says so, capital¬ 
istic leaders will order into effect all the 
important grants which labor asks for. In 
the steady generation of a fundamentally 
humane public spirit and temper and de- 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 103 


mand, the church can perform an indis¬ 
pensable part. Sooner or later she will, 
by the insistence upon the rights due every 
man, make her contribution to the neces¬ 
sary climatic changes in social realms 
looking toward better life even for the 
lowliest manual labor. 

In what I have been saying I have had 
in mind the church as a whole. May I 
say also that in many individual churches 
pastors and people are working definitely 
at specific tasks to learn about laboring 
groups in a spirit of sincere helpfulness. I 
do not find among churches any tendency 
to patronize labor. In some quarters good 
men hold back from seeking too close an 
approach to labor for fear of giving offense 
to those who pride themselves on their 
own spiritual and moral resources. More¬ 
over, even though some churches are la¬ 
mentably weak in their hold on organized 
labor they are, for the most part, composed 
of honest, hardworking people, filled with 
the spirit of good will. As for the churches 
being directly controlled by money powers, 
in ten years of experience on the Methodist 
Board of Bishops I have never heard 


104 


LIVING TOGETHER 


church policies discussed from the point of 
view of their effect on rich givers. I do 
not deny, however, or seek to minimize the 
fact that commercial standards and a com¬ 
mercial atmosphere send their sickening 
fumes into the religious fields. Church 
leaders do not consciously yield to Mam¬ 
mon. Mammon nevertheless plays too 
large a part in producing the social air 
which we all breathe—and the church in¬ 
evitably suffers. 


So far I have been addressing myself 
chiefly to the side of labor. May I turn 
now to a more direct statement to church¬ 
men. A good many nervous churchmen 
are in panic these days over the appear¬ 
ance of radicalism as to industrial questions 
in labor circles, and over the support 
which this radicalism is receiving from 
some quarters inside the church. What is 
this industrial radicalism inside the church? 

Part of it is not radicalism at all except 
as insistence upon free discussion. A wise 
conservatism always insists on getting the 
radical to talking, for when the radical 




THE CHURCH AND LABOR 105 


talks we at least know what he is talking 
about. We do not know what he is talking 
about when he talks down cellar or in a 
back alley. Some alleged church radical¬ 
ism is nothing more or less than an attempt 
to get industrial discussion out into the 
open, where we can all hear it. 

Just after Bolshevism came to power in 
Russia I was asked to preach in Boston 
to a group of professed Bolshevists, whom 
a religious worker had induced to come to 
church on the agreement that after I had 
spoken for half an hour they could talk 
back to me for an hour and a half. The 
Bolshevists looked outwardly fierce enough 
and used some fierce figures of rhetoric. 
What they wanted to talk about, however, 
the day I was with them, was the general 
worthlessness and uselessness of bishops. 
It was remarkable to note how closely, 
both in substance of doctrine and in ex¬ 
pression, they ran parallel to many a 
speech I had heard in Methodist preachers’ 
meetings. 

I have just said that the wise conserva¬ 
tive always insists upon discussion. I 
mean that he sees how much better it is to 


106 


LIVING TOGETHER 


have such open discussion than to have 
explosions of dynamite. I must admit, 
however, that the radical often does his 
utmost to provoke the social conservative 
to speech, for the conservative does not 
always talk wisely. Sidney and Beatrice 
Webb have recently called attention to the 
resentment which the stand-pat capitalist 
feels when the revolutionist laughs at his 
attempt to throw the cloak of superior 
morality over capitalism, over its justifica¬ 
tion of remuneration for owning rather 
than for service, especially. The capitalist 
gets purple with rage when the revolution¬ 
ist wants to know why anyone should pay 
the capitalist for owning. Why doesn’t the 
capitalist speak up and answer? The stock 
reply about being entitled to pay for sav¬ 
ing is good as far as it goes, but how far 
does it go toward justification of pay for 
costless saving? Is the socially minded 
young preacher to be rebuked just for ask¬ 
ing this question, especially when we re¬ 
member that the capitalist is given to 
falling back upon high moral ground in 
defense of the existing industrial system? 
Religious sanctions are indeed of the high- 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 107 


est worth. All the more reason, then, for 
being patient with the radical Christian 
who wants to know what the sanctions are, 
when a particular feature of present indus¬ 
try is under scrutiny. The instant we 
speak of sacredness the Christian has a 
right to ask questions. 

The truth is that the church is always 
baptizing and receiving into its fellowship 
social institutions before she is sure that 
those institutions have soundly been con¬ 
verted. 

Dr. Percy Gardner has rendered inval¬ 
uable service in interpreting church his¬ 
tory as a succession of such institutional 
baptisms into Christ—or at least into the 
name of Christ. Greek thought and Greek 
religious ritual, Roman law and adminis¬ 
tration, Teutonic family customs all have 
been baptized into the name of Christ. 
The process still goes on. Now, when it 
comes to baptizing an industrial order into 
the name of Christ we are fortunate in¬ 
deed if we have some ruthless questioner 
at hand, young enough not to have any 
more sense than to put searching inquiries 
to the candidate. It would never do to 



108 


LIVING TOGETHER 


baptize individuals without at least some¬ 
body to answer for them. Why should not 
the institutional candidate submit to cate¬ 
chizing? Such questioning is an ungracious 
task at best—but it has to be done. The 
Christianization of the industrial life may 
otherwise lead to the industrialization of 
the Christian life, which is not desirable. 
Roman imperialism took a deadly revenge 
upon Christianity for bringing it into nom¬ 
inal submission to the name of Christ when 
Rome finally ended in the imperialization 
of Christianity. So a questionable indus¬ 
trial order might wreak an ironical revenge 
upon a Christianity coming to formal con¬ 
trol over it, by the secularization of Chris¬ 
tianity. It is the hardest conceivable 
spiritual feat for church officials to move 
in any atmosphere charged with the fumes 
of commercial success without being mor¬ 
ally poisoned. The worst feature about 
poison gas is that you can’t see it. The 
radical performs a fine service in reminding 
us of its presence. 

Whether we are dealing with a codified 
system of law or with the body of customs 
and ideas of which that law is the expres- 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 109 


sion, the more an industrial system claims 
finality the more morally dangerous it is. 
So we need men to tell us that the system 
is in need of being broken up even if we 
have no intention of breaking it up. The 
more nearly perfect any system—as a sys¬ 
tem—dealing with human life pronounces 
itself the more need of being severe with it. 
We need not expect the invectives of the 
labor radical to be overdiscriminating. Dis¬ 
crimination is not his task. The others will 
be discriminating enough. The psalmist 
said that he meditated in the law day and 
night. He would probably have resented 
Paul’s charge that the law was a body of 
death. The social radicals in the ministry 
may be fools—but they are like the fools 
who used to remind rulers of the ever¬ 
present danger of death. The wise ruler 
is not like the king of the old story as he 
caught what the king’s fool was shouting. 
“Stop that fool’s mouth,” ordered the 
king. “He’s nothing but a fool,” replied 
the courtiers. “No doubt,” replied the 
king, “but if he keeps on talking like that 
he will upset my throne.” Such fool’s talk 
ought to be heeded. The redness of the 


110 


LIVING TOGETHER 


radical is socially useful if it is the red of 
a danger lantern. 

Does not the Christian radical make the 
same mistake in trying to Christianize 
radical labor views as does the church in 
trying to Christianize existing capitalistic 
views? Very likely. Let it be remembered 
that we are not objecting to the Christian 
appropriation of capitalistic institutions as 
such, but objecting to appropriating them 
before we are sure they can be made Chris¬ 
tian. The trouble with all social systems 
is that they need Christian birth into a 
new spirit. It no doubt seems Quixotic 
when a preacher tries to bring labor rad¬ 
icalism into line with the spirit of Jesus, 
but it is no more Quixotic than to attempt 
to get oil kings, and steel kings, and meat 
kings, and grain kings to rule primarily for 
the service of the governed. It is a stren¬ 
uous task, any way you look at it, this 
task of institutional regeneration and sanc¬ 
tification. 

If all this seems loose and dangerous, let 
us of the church remind ourselves that 
there are grave limitations in the path of 
the social prophet’s quickly upsetting any- 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 111 


thing. Amos and Isaiah and Micah 
preached social righteousness twenty-five 
hundred years ago, and their cherished 
dreams have not yet come true. The 
prophet’s radicalism is like a melting snow 
in the Rocky Mountains. Sometimes it 
does indeed sweep everything before it in 
flood, but the rush does not last long. In 
the end it is canalized into a social irriga¬ 
tion system that does good after the radical 
is gone. Here again is a touch of irony; 
we all live on yesterday’s radicalism. Our 
prophets to-day will be widely acclaimed 
by the next generation. Perhaps it is just 
as well. If to-day’s prophets had it all 
their own way now, they might, with flood¬ 
like violence, tear up things by the roots. 
To-morrow their radicalism will be soaking 
into these same roots. 

So the best tactics with the industrial 
radical in the church is to try to put into 
effect what of his teaching seems sound. 
Above all, it is necessary to remember that 
among the cranks and wild fellows who ad¬ 
mittedly get into the ranks of the ministry 
there are some true prophets of the Most 
High—men who stand in the line of sue- 


m 


LIVING TOGETHER 


cession from the prophets of old. Let them 
speak forth. There are enough steady 
church journalists to set us right when they 
lead us astray; and enough bishops and 
superintendents and secretaries and trustees 
to see that their practical recommendations 
are tactfully—oh, so tactfully!—amended 
and corrected. Anybody who widely knows 
American life knows how little danger there 
is of any quick industrial or social over¬ 
turn. Take Bolshevism as the extreme of 
radical proposals. When Lenin first grasped 
power in Russia he decreed that the culti¬ 
vators of the soil must raise all the grain 
they could, take out just enough to carry 
themselves to the next harvest time, and 
send the rest without remuneration to the 
central headquarters for distribution among 
factory workers. That was simon-pure 
Bolshevism. Does anyone who knows the 
American farmer in the flesh think that 
system is likely to come here quickly? Not 
in Coshocton County, Ohio, where I was 
born. That particular item of Bolshevism 
did not last long even in Russia. 

And now, having spoken to labor and to 
the church, may I claim the privilege of 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 113 


uttering a few words of advice to my more 
radically minded younger brethren in the 
ministry—advice which I fear may smack 
so thoroughly of worldly counsel as to 
nullify all the high morality which I have 
thus far sought to encourage? I assume, 
however, that the young radical recognizes 
the fact that he is working in a church, 
that he is not living an isolated life, that 
as a member of a social group he must 
learn to get along with others as he ex¬ 
pects others to get along with him, that 
membership in a group implies some vital 
though not always sharply defined obliga¬ 
tions on the individual members. 

To begin with, let me make use of the 
caution which a wise social leader—him¬ 
self inclined to radicalism—used to give 
his followers, namely, not to act in such 
fashion as to lay oneself open to the charge 
of pose, or affectation. There is no great 
harm in eccentricity of dress or manner in 
itself. If the peculiarity is the spontaneous 
expression of an ebullient spirit slightly de¬ 
fiant of the conventions of dress, it adds a 
little touch of the picturesque to the daily 
experience of the onlooker. In any case a 



114 


LIVING TOGETHER 


radical would better defy the laws of dress 
than the marriage laws. The sad, sad fact 
is, however, that this childish world in 
which we live is so given to the belief that 
the inner things of the spirit are manifest 
from the things that do outwardly appear 
that public opinion is prone to conclude 
that because a radical wears an outlandish 
collar he, therefore, believes in free love or 
something as bad. Our manners are part 
of our speech in this social existence of 
ours. It is not quite fair to ourselves or 
to our cause to have our clothes and our 
gait and our gestures shouting forth lies 
about us. 

A second homely word, especially to 
those whose radicalism takes the direction 
of invective, is the oft-quoted injunction to 
make sure of the facts before assailing the 
fortress of evil. There are facts enough to 
assail, if the crusader is patient enough to 
get hold of them, and cool enough in the 
course of invective not to let go of them. 
In seeking to reform the present industrial 
system into a Christian organism, there are 
facts enough in the admissions of the 
leaders of the system themselves—admis- 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 115 


sions often all the more damaging from the 
fact that the leaders sometimes do not 
realize that they are talking paganism. 
For example, the modern industrialist’s ad¬ 
mission of his adherence to industrial au¬ 
tocracy is as open and naive as was John 
Wesley’s admission that his control of 
Methodism was despotic. “Of course it is 
despotic,” said Wesley, “but I see no harm 
in despotism as long as I am the despot.” 
If we go beyond such open admission in 
the search for facts, let us make sure of 
the facts. When Dr. Charles H. Park- 
hurst opened his famous campaign against 
Tammany he made particular charges 
which he felt to be true, but which he did 
not know to be true. When he was called 
upon by Tammany for proof he said he 
learned a lesson which would last him 
several ages into eternity. The upholders 
of questionable social and industrial meth¬ 
ods and systems insist that he who an¬ 
nounces as a fact something which he does 
not know to be a fact is as much a liar as 
he who deliberately lies, even if subsequent 
investigation proves that the liar told the 
truth. The ethical fervor of defenders of 


/ 


116 


LIVING TOGETHER 


any form of status quo is very exacting at 
this point. On the whole, it is just as well 
for the Christian radical to make the best 
putting possible of his opponent’s side of 
the case—the completest, the fairest, the 
most charitable. 

Once more, the radical should always re¬ 
mind himself that the demands of honesty 
are not met just by his uttering the truth 
to his own satisfaction. Let me repeat 
what I said in a previous chapter. If the 
preacher were merely a literary character 
writing for the delectation of a group of 
admirers who would take time to find out 
what he meant, or if he were a pedagogue 
setting a task of interpretation to learners, 
the case would be different; but the radical 
of whom I speak is a preacher striving after 
prophecy. The prophets were intelligible 
—at least to those of their own time. 
Truth is uttered to somebody. It is not 
the highest type of honesty to seem to be 
saying one thing when we have in mind a 
different thing—if it is possible by honest 
effort to avoid misunderstanding. Some 
misunderstanding in social utterance can¬ 
not be avoided. All the more reason then 




THE CHURCH AND LABOR 117 


to avoid what misunderstanding we can. 
The prophet may not care what people 
think of himself, but he ought to care 
what people think of his message, espe¬ 
cially since the message in the end depends 
upon public opinion to put it into effect. 
There are some radicals whose counte¬ 
nances themselves are breaches of the 
peace. They are, of course, not responsible 
for the fact that riotous physical features 
add an unintentional ferocity to their words. 
Radicals are to be blamed, however, if 
their words express a riotousness which the 
prophet does not intend, if the radical can 
make himself clear. It is a sin not only 
against literary honesty but against social 
honesty as well when a prophet needlessly 
seems to be uttering violence of opinion 
which he does not feel. If the preacher has 
to put in six days explaining that he did 
not mean what he seemed to intend on the 
preceding Sunday, the question naturally 
arises as to why he did not take pains to 
make himself clear. Was it fair to give 
five hundred hearers an impression he did 
not intend? Still, we must not bear down 
too hard on the brother who allows the 


118 


LIVING TOGETHER 


people to think he is wilder than he is. 
His moral fault is not as bad as that of his 
fellow minister who lets the people think 
he is tamer than he is—the man who rages 
inwardly with a radicalism which he does 
not openly express—and gets to the end of 
a long ministry praised for being loyal to 
the old faith and for never lugging dis¬ 
turbing social questions into the religious 
field. 

There are some grievous moral tempta¬ 
tions which beset the true prophet. It is 
always spiritually dangerous for a man to 
suppose, or even to know, that he has 
seized a moral revelation not yet vouch¬ 
safed to his fellows. He may forget that 
other men may have moral revelations not 
yet vouchsafed to him. On the one hand, 
he is tempted to think more highly of him¬ 
self than he ought and, on the other hand, 
less highly of his fellows than he ought. 
There is always the possibility of his be¬ 
coming a scold or a cynic, or a sour and 
morose nuisance. Even so, he is a nobler 
spectacle, in the sight of angels if not of 
men, than his brother who has moved 
through this world of blasted ideals and 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 119 


disappointed hopes and stunted lives and 
thwarted spiritual endeavor brought about 
by man’s organized inhumanity to man, and 
never raged against it. There is a difference 
between prophets and chaplains. Chaplains 
are ministers who fit themselves as com¬ 
fortably as may be to institutions, whether 
the institutions be armies, asylums, or so¬ 
cial orders, and then minister to the com¬ 
fort of the inmates of the institution as 
they can. An army chaplain is not likely 
to attack war. It is his business to bring 
to war as many of the comforts of home as 
possible. Upholders of established orders 
have this chaplain spirit. Probably any 
church organization must have a certain 
proportion of chaplains, but the chaplain 
must not be complacent overmuch. A dis¬ 
appointed, broken-spirited failure of a 
prophet is better than he, for the tragedy 
of the chaplain is greater than that of the 
prophet in that the chaplain has never 
met in the institution which he serves any¬ 
thing to be disappointed about. 

Before turning to another theme I wish 
to speak a word of recognition of the ex- 



no 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ample labor has set before the church in 
social efficiency in action for an ideal. 
First of all, there is a sort of intellectual 
corrective in labor itself which is in part 
responsible for the intellectual soundness of 
at least the larger labor policies. Jesus 
said that he who would do the will of God 
would come to a knowledge of the truth, 
and that under all learning must be a doing 
of the word. It will not suffice to limit 
this teaching of Jesus barely to the doing 
of specifically religious tasks. There is im¬ 
plied here a recognition of the fact that 
sound learning bases itself, at least in part, 
on will activities. The tool which a man 
holds tends to fashion the development of 
his hand, and that, in turn, has its influence 
on his mind. The modern psychologist is 
on the right track when he insists that the 
hand is quite as important for the develop¬ 
ment of the mind as is the eye or the ear. 
Robertson of Brighton, toiling as he did 
among machine operatives, used to say 
that commerce, strictly speaking, apart 
from any considerable manual labor, is of 
low moral and intellectual significance as 
compared with working with tools. The 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 121 


statement as thus put is one-sided, but 
has a kernel of truth. There is a solidify¬ 
ing, steadying factor in the labor which 
has to do with things, provided the work 
is not so heavy or monotonous, or the 
hours so long as to make the worker merely 
part of the machinery. For this funda¬ 
mental psychological reason there is likely 
to be a soundness of intellectual judgment 
among manual workers which is of social 
significance. A church made up wholly of 
those not working with their hands would 
be a church given to vagaries and intel¬ 
lectual aberrations. Perhaps much of what 
we call the sanity of the early church came 
out of the fact that it was composed of 
ordinary people working for their daily 
bread. 

I need not say that the Labor Move¬ 
ment, in spite of all its mistakes, presents 
the church with an object lesson of effec¬ 
tive social cohesion. The reasons for this 
success are two—reliance on doctrine and 
on group loyalty. The Labor Movement 
is a standing contradiction to the claim 
that creeds and doctrines are no longer 
socially useful; that in these days it makes 



122 


LIVING TOGETHER 


no particular difference what a man be¬ 
lieves. There is, to be sure, a choice in 
creeds, but a creedless social organization 
will not long hold together. President 
Lowell, in Public Opinion in Peace and 
War , suggestively declares that the mob 
action described in the book of Acts which 
had only the cry: “Great is Diana of the 
Ephesians” for its intellectual furnishing, 
lasted about two hours—about as long as 
it could be expected to last with nothing 
but a cry. The Labor Movement is 
founded on a creed. The tighter the hold 
on that creed the tighter the organization 
sticks together and the solider its impact 
on the public mind. 

It is a mere commonplace to anyone who 
knows labor groups that the devotion of 
the members of the groups to the groups 
is of high order. We would have to go 
back many centuries in church history to 
find exact parallels in large number to 
scores and hundreds of labor leaders to-day. 
The cheap sneer that the labor leader 
works at an easy job for handsome pay is 
given the lie by the willingness of the 
leader to put up with ridicule and invec- 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 123 


tive and persecution and imprisonment for 
the sake of his cause. As for the mass of 
organized labor, we could wish nothing 
better for the church than that it might 
command from its followers the willing¬ 
ness to endure pain and hunger and pos¬ 
sible death which laborers in masses time 
and again show in strikes, mistaken as the 
particular strike may be. Mistake or no 
mistake, the condition of labor to-day 
would be abject indeed if it bad not been, 
and if it were not now, for the loyalty of 
laborers to their cause. 


The church ought to seek to get hold of 
all this human power, not, indeed, for her¬ 
self, but for the common cause which 
churches and labor groups should together 
seek to advance. There are many phases 
of church teaching and activity which lie 
outside of labor activity; there are many 
phases of labor organization activity which 
do not concern the church. The two groups 
can unite, however, in the broad aim of 
setting on high the loftiest human ideal 
and in seeking to control the materials of 
the earth in the interest of that ideal. 



124 


LIVING TOGETHER 


Public opinion is the ultimate power in 
social advance. It works now and then by 
applauding an occasional captain of indus¬ 
try who voluntarily assists labor to a bet¬ 
ter order, and by putting pressure on the 
other captains who do not work so volun¬ 
tarily. It leads now to the repeal of an 
old law, now to the passage of a new one, 
now to the creation of that atmosphere in 
which the useless is left to atrophy and 
the useful is given its chance. It is the 
business of the church and of the Labor 
-Movement to make the emphasis of public 
opinion both human and humane. The 
labor groups will then see men getting 
their chance and the church will see God 
getting his chance. This double, or at 
least two-sided and yet identical, point of 
view is the Christian view. Meanwhile, 
we call upon labor groups to remember 
that the church is working for them even 
though many church members do not know 
it, and might not approve if they did, and 
we call upon the church groups to remem¬ 
ber that multitudes in the labor circles are 
working in the Christ spirit, even though 
they may not suspect the fact themselves. 


THE CHURCH AND LABOR 125 


None of the above is intended to slow 
down the vigor of labor in urging its own 
claims, so long as that vigor does not 
resort to violence. The cause of labor is 
not safe with either the capitalist class 
alone or with the church alone. The only 
method of showing either capitalism or the 
church the just claims of labor is by the 
insistence of labor itself. Labor states its 
own case, the church helps inform public 
opinion as to the trend of the human ideals 
of Christianity. Capitalism, through its 
technicians, makes the final adjustments 
which mark a step forward in the humani¬ 
zation and Christianization of the social 
order. 

At this juncture some impatient reader 
breaks out against what he calls a barren 
and mean result—capital still in existence 
and labor always doomed to fight capital. 
Let such reader remember that I am call¬ 
ing for orderly and regular steps of social 
betterment through a Christian public 
opinion, and that I am not marking any 
final stopping place for that betterment. 
Capital as tools we must always have. 
Capital as organized ownership must sub- 



126 


LIVING TOGETHER 


mit to whatever the Christian social con¬ 
science decrees. The capitalistic spirit of 
profit for private gain will have to yield 
to the motive of service in all realms. 
Let us believe that the transformation of 
motive, with whatever change of social 
organization it may involve, will come 
about through new births of Christian 
spirit. The capitalistic spirit will still be 
greedy even if it takes the garments of 
socialism. Socialism, democracy, labor, all 
can be materialistic in spirit. It is against 
materialism that our real battle lies, only 
we must never forget that materialism 
comes often out of such poverty that the 
material needs bulk too large in the daily 
thinking; and the Christian thought must 
always move directly against a soul- 
destroying poverty. Hence the paradox 
that the church must call for larger ma¬ 
terial productivity, and for a larger share 
of material goods for labor, for the sake of 
larger spiritual life. 


IV 

CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 

One of the most pronounced after¬ 
effects of the Great War has been the 
questioning attitude which increasing num¬ 
bers of thoughtful persons find themselves 
taking toward patriotism. The war nat¬ 
urally led to an exaggeration of the pa¬ 
triotic feeling. That was to be expected, 
but it was to be expected also that with 
the return of peace the patriotic fervor 
would sink back to normal. The return 
has been slow. Some distortions and aber¬ 
rations of national sentiment linger along, 
or, rather, show such vitality as to raise, 
seriously, the question as to what place 
patriotism can have in a Christian scheme 
of things. Must we subscribe to the doc¬ 
trine of “My country right or wrong”? 
Is the vote of a majority binding, not 
merely as practically settling a question for 
the time being, but as uttering a final 
moral judgment? Are there no limits to 

127 


LIVING TOGETHER 


128 

the limits which the nation is to set upon 
the utterance of independent opinion? 
Must we always have war? How far can 
a majority vote make right a scheme for 
the wholesale killing of men? In the face 
of the fact that large numbers of men are 
willing to make patriotism of the aggres¬ 
sive, pugnacious, bellicose type almost a 
religion, other men are beginning to say 
that patriotism is one of the foes of human 
progress and of the kingdom of God, that 
it is essentially the spirit of the Antichrist. 
Must we take either of these attitudes? 
Must we yield blindly to patriotism or dis¬ 
card it altogether and call patriotism the 
resource and resort of knaves and fools? 

I do not think it necessary to take either 
of such possible choices. Christianity never 
moves forth to the destruction of any¬ 
thing, except as a last resort. In the 
Master’s parable, the man with the ax 
who would forthwith cut down the tree was 
not, after all, so radical or thoroughgoing 
as the man who would first dig about the 
tree and fertilize it. Christianity seeks to 
save everything which has in it any prom¬ 
ise of good whatsoever; but Christianity 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 129 


saves on its own terms—terms of rebirth, 
of conversion into new life. Not merely in 
their more individualistic duties but in 
their wider social activities must men be 
brought under the spirit of Jesus. One 
thing is sure—if patriotism is not sooner 
or later to wreck the world, it will have 
to be purified by the spirit of Christ. 

One apologist for a vigorous patriotism 
declares that patriotism is an innate in¬ 
stinct; that it is as natural as breathing; 
that man is inherently pugnacious; that 
there is an “urge” about the patriotic feel¬ 
ing that links it close to the forces we think 
of as divine. 

It is clear upon a little reflection that 
there is some confusion here. No one is 
denying the innateness of patriotic feeling. 
No one is denying the sacredness of a true 
man’s devotion to the land which gave 
him birth, or to the institutions which fos¬ 
tered his growing life, or to the people 
that made his own individual life worth 
living. Surely, Christianity is not to stamp 
out a feeling like this. No, Christianity is 
not set upon stamping out anything, but 




130 


LIVING TOGETHER 


upon controlling everything in the name 
and spirit of the Lord Jesus. Let us re¬ 
mind ourselves that the scientific temper 
of to-day is questioning and cross-question¬ 
ing all our instincts and “urges” to see 
whence they come and whither they are 
going and whether the direction can be 
changed to advantage. An urge is no 
longer self-evidently divine just because it 
is an urge. Some urges come out of a phy¬ 
sical base, like hunger or sex; some out of 
selfishness, some out of pugnacity or the 
craving for acquisition. No urge is sum¬ 
marily to be cast out, but all are to be 
controlled. Is it not possible as Christians 
to control the patriotic impulse? Think of 
what we are doing with the basic instincts 
of hunger and sex. For centuries these 
two forms of innate human activity have 
been under a measure of control. The 
establishment of a regular routine of three 
meals a day was a step toward the control 
of irregular and savage eating. The foun¬ 
dation of the family was the longest step 
ever taken in the rationalization and 
moralization of a physical impulse. I am 
not thinking, however, of the past but of 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 131 


the present, of the way scientific rules for 
the guidance of the hunger impulse to¬ 
ward the best health are followed so largely 
that some keepers of dining halls print 
figures of calories opposite the food items 
in the bill of fare and that treatises on 
dietetics sell by the thousands. I am 
thinking also of the extent to which the 
period of adolescence is studied with the 
aim of the control of an appetite which, 
unregulated, means positive disaster to 
human society. 

The glamour of war, in its actual proc¬ 
esses, does not play much part just now. 
We know too well what the actual features 
of war are. Poison gas, vermin, and mud 
are elements quite hard to mix with glory. 
There do cling around the patriotic idea, 
however, the feelings having to do with 
adventure and pugnacity and competition. 
It is such feelings as these that William 
James seemed to have in mind when he 
sought to establish a moral equivalent for 
war. All of these can be controlled in the 
name of Christ. The conquest of physical 
nature itself calls for a type of courage if 
anything higher than that of the battle- 


132 


LIVING TOGETHER 


field. Some pessimists are avowing that it 
would be a good thing for the welfare of 
the race if all our modern physical and 
chemical knowledge—especially that which 
has to do with the unlocking of destructive 
forces—could be forgotten overnight. 
There is ground for the fear that we have 
learned the use of high explosives before 
mastering the high moral purpose which 
would use the explosives aright. It is an 
utter perversion to take powers like dyna¬ 
mite and turn them, not against rocks 
which block the paths of our fellow men, 
but against men themselves. The search¬ 
ing down and tracking out of the disease 
forces of nature calls for keener power than 
that of military strategy. Moreover, the 
increasing seriousness with which these 
exalted human aims are undertaken can 
furnish that Spartan discipline which, the 
strenuous tell us, is necessary for the moral 
virility of the successive generations of 
men. 

Some who will concede all this tell us 
that we can never thus productively con¬ 
trol the basic patriotic feelings as long as 
public opinion insists upon rewarding mili- 



CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 133 


tary heroes with its chief honors. This 
objection can hardly be taken seriously. 
Through long stretches of time, many a 
nation has honored leaders who have never 
known war. Giving the objection its full 
weight, does it mean that public opinion 
never can be converted to Christian stand¬ 
ards? Does it mean that men as indi¬ 
viduals can be brought to follow Christ, 
but as soon as they get together to discuss 
national matters they are necessarily to be 
swept into unchristian tempers; that where 
two or three Christians meet together, 
there necessarily and inevitably is the devil 
in the midst of them? It used to be quite 
commonly held that the temptations of the 
devil come to men one at a time; that, 
when two or three good men get together, 
there Christ is apt to be in the midst of 
them. Nowadays it seems that Christ is 
often conceded to be the Lord of the sep¬ 
arate and isolated activities of men, but 
that he cannot rule the spirit which takes 
hold on men as they come together. The 
distance between this conception and that 
of the New Testament needs no comment. 


134 


LIVING TOGETHER 


We have not touched bottom yet. An 
insistent student of war deplores war as 
such, but will have it that wars come out 
of economic factors—that there are only so 
many stores of raw material on earth and 
that these are objects of competition among 
nations. Nations will fight for these goods. 
It will not do to call men basely material¬ 
istic for thus fighting, for the conflict is 
for the necessities of national life. The 
fight is for self-preservation. 

We are willing to admit that it is not 
fair to call nations grossly materialistic for 
struggling after material goods. The na¬ 
tion desires coal and oil to move locomo¬ 
tives and ships, to turn factory wheels, to 
make garments, to build houses, to prepare 
food. These are necessities of life. The 
battle for these riches is one form of the 
battle for existence. 

Let us grant all this. Suppose there are 
not enough raw materials to give all the 
peoples all they can use. Suppose we 
plunge ahead and have a war over the 
division of the raw materials—and the 
sources of the raw materials pass out of 
the hands of one national group to an- 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 135 


other national group. The defeated and 
robbed nation does not cease to exist. It 
lives along somehow, cherishing the deep¬ 
est hatred toward the conqueror. How 
much has the conqueror won? Groups of 
financial leaders may have marvelously 
profited, but how much has the nation 
won when we take into account the loss of 
life, the crippled youths, the destroyed 
capital, the devastated lands, the pension 
lists, the public indebtedness? Just as a 
proposition in plain good sense, would not 
everybody have been better off if there had 
been a rational agreement about the divi¬ 
sion of the raw materials? Suppose by the 
agreement that neither side gets what it 
thinks it ought to have. Would not a 
deliberate curtailment of national economic 
activity be better than the forced curtail¬ 
ment which comes from killing men and 
ruining railroads and factories and fields? 

Another student tells us that the birth¬ 
rate of the human race is the chief cause 
of war—that some peoples increase faster 
than other peoples and that this increase 
brings them into conflict; that modern 
science is finding ways of carrying human 


136 


LIVING TOGETHER 


life through infancy to maturity so that 
the nations are becoming overcrowded, that 
a high natural birth-rate must be met by a 
high unnatural death-rate. This utterance 
indeed has merit, but where, after all, is 
the crowding taking place? Germany is 
supposed to have increased fast in the last 
half century, but it does not seem to have 
been an actual pressure of Germany’s popu¬ 
lation that brought on the war. Japan is 
increasing fast, but Japan is not sending 
forth such tremendous streams of emi¬ 
grants. The Japanese want to live in lands 
and climates like Japan. They want raw 
materials which they can manufacture into 
finished products at home. 

This argument at last comes down to 
about the same base as the other—the 
pressure for increasing supplies of material 
for the increasing population. Is it better 
to divide than to fight? Even granting 
that the people of a land are increasing 
faster than the land can take care of them, 
is the increase the outcome of an irresist¬ 
ible force? Malthus himself, who first 
formulated the doctrine of population to 
the effect that, if the race were not hin- 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 137 


dered by plague and catastrophe from con¬ 
stant increase, the population would soon 
outrun the means of sustenance, declared 
that the problem of equilibrium between 
the numbers of population and the material 
resources could be solved by increase of the 
standard of living and by moral restraint. 
This population appeal for war simply 
means that we are presumably not dealing 
with a race of rational beings at all. It is 
true that we of the United States have not 
yet felt the pressure of our population; but 
suppose we were feeling it now. For a 
time we were paying ninety-two cents of 
every dollar of taxes for wars—past or to 
come. Suppose we could put aside all 
thought of war and take that ninety-two 
cents per dollar to develop, intensively, the 
agricultural and industrial resources of the 
country. How long would it take us to 
put ourselves on a basis where we could 
take care of all our possible population 
without asking land of any nation to which 
our emigrants might move? A good many 
of the natural resources are of a sort that 
will soon be gone, we are dolefully told. 
If it is true that the oil of the earth will 



138 


LIVING TOGETHER 


be burned up in fifty years, all the more 
reason why we should not have a war over 
oil. What sane human being wants to 
fight for material that will not last fifty 
years? Better turn our wits toward the 
search for some more durable forms of 
force. 


Still another explainer of war tells us 
that we are so made that we resent insults 
to the flag, that we have a delicate sense 
of national honor, that we simply will not 
stand by and see, not ourselves, but the 
national group to which we belong in¬ 
sulted. There is no doubt as to the prev¬ 
alence of national “touchiness”; but here, 
again, the question is as to whether we 
are ever to be socially sane. If a man 
becomes really a man, there are some ac¬ 
tions which cannot insult him. What 
scholar cares what the ignoramus says 
about him? What gentleman is disturbed 
by the gibes or grimaces of a buffoon? 
What Christian looks with anything but 
pity upon evil-spirited thrusts at himself? 
If such attack leads to possibility of actual 
harm, we are dealing with another prob- 



CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 139 


lem; but we are now talking of that realm 
of slight to national honor which has fig¬ 
ured so much in begetting war, or at least 
in fanning the war spirit. We are facing 
again the plain question as to whether men 
in groups can attain to the excellence of 
men as individuals. If an individual were 
to try to move in good society and keep 
stress always on the rights and etiquette 
due him, as nations do in their attitude 
toward one another, he would be laughed 
out of society. 

We don’t seem, though, to be getting far 
toward a Christian solution. Suppose we 
just take seriously the idea of the gospel 
as to the worth of human lives, not Amer¬ 
ican, or English, or French lives merely, 
but human lives everywhere. Let us try 
not to be literalists in our gospel interpre¬ 
tation, but let us aim to keep to the spirit 
of the gospel as a whole. Let us hold be¬ 
fore ourselves the plain meaning of the 
Word—that men are of such importance 
that though they are sinners and blun¬ 
derers, Christ died for them, and died for 
them, not just as a prophet suffering on 
his own account, but died for them to 


140 


LIVING TOGETHER 


show how the Christlike God feels toward 
them. Then the question is as to whether 
we can reconcile killing men with any im¬ 
plication of Christ’s thought about men. 
It may be fairly argued in the case of an 
individual person here and there that he 
has become so brutalized by his own bru¬ 
talities that brute force is all he under¬ 
stands. He must be restrained, locked up, 
kept off the streets where normal human 
beings move. Who, in heaven’s name, 
could bring such an indictment as that 
against a whole nation? 

The conscientious objector, to whom I 
shall give much space later in this chapter, 
is annoying to me because of his literalism. 
If we are to take part of the words of Jesus 
literally, we have to take them all liter¬ 
ally; and then we get into trouble. When 
the conscientious objector says he would 
not defend his own children against out¬ 
raging assailants, we know he is raving. 
There is no need of raving, for the logic 
of his position does not call for such ex¬ 
tremes. If he will forget his literalism and 
lay hold of the spiritual essential of the 
gospel, he can stand against war on the 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 141 


ground of the utter impossibility of recon¬ 
ciling it with any such thought of human 
beings and human life as that which filled 
the mind and moved the heart of Jesus. 
There is no way of sanctifying war. There 
is no possibility of uniforming Christ in 
khaki. We can say truly that there are 
times when the Christian falls short of the 
Christ ideal as to war, or is borne down 
short of that ideal by public sentiment; but 
we cannot say that he is following a khaki- 
clad Christ. Better admit inability to live 
up to the ideal than to lower the ideal. It 
is not only that war kills the bodies of men 
—it poisons and kills the mind by perver¬ 
sions from the truth. The objector is 
right, not when he calls for literal obe¬ 
dience to a literally minded Christ, but 
when he speaks in the spirit of Christ for 
the sanctity of human lives everywhere. 
Men for whom Christ died must not be 
killed by poison gas or bayonet thrust; 
they must not be lied to; they must not 
be plunged into hate. I was just as anx¬ 
ious as anyone to see the cause of the 
Allies prevail in the last war. I now cast 
no stones at anyone. Still, I say that 


142 


LIVING TOGETHER 


since we had to fall short of the Christian 
ideal and go to war, we may just as well 
face the spiritual consequences of that war 
—an emphasis on propaganda so strong 
that it may be years before we get back 
the power to see straight; a distortion of 
the faculties of spiritual balance so severe 
that it may take us a long, long time to 
judge national issues aright; a blurring 
over our finer discernments so complete 
that only the ruder shocks disturb our 
minds. 

The path of the salvation of patriotism 
lies not past the victories of militarism. 
Salvation for a nation is essentially the 
same as salvation for an individual. It 
comes out of repentance for sin; out of a 
desire for new birth, for new life following 
the commandments of God and walking 
from henceforth in his holy ways. “Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” is the 
second great commandment. Evidently, a 
man’s love for his neighbor cannot be im¬ 
portant if he has no respect for himself. 
Genuine self-regard among neighbors and 
nations ought to go hand in hand with 
regard for others. 



CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 143 


This implies, does it not, that there must 
be some world organization in which na¬ 
tions live peacefully together? It certainly 
does—but it implies, before organization, 
the change of heart among nations which 
must amount to veritable regeneration. It 
means Christian love, not, indeed, in a 
chiefly emotional or affectional sense, but 
in a willingness on the part of one nation 
to look at and appreciate other nations, 
appreciate them at their points of strength, 
rejoice in their ability to make each its 
own unique contribution to the life of the 
whole. It implies on the part of every 
nation a willingness to hold its own geo¬ 
graphical and industrial and cultural ex¬ 
cellence under a sense of trusteeship for all 
men—thinking of men always in human 
terms. 

The noblest tract on patriotism, espe¬ 
cially international patriotism, that I know 
is the book of Jonah. Jonah was a Jew 
filled with a consciousness of the superior¬ 
ity of his people. As a member of the 
chosen race he had such sense of his own 
consequence that he dared talk back to 
God. He would not go and preach to 


144 


LIVING TOGETHER 


Nineveh, the capital of his deadliest ene¬ 
mies. To escape going to Nineveh he 
would sail away off to Tarshish, in the 
west somewhere; for, according to Jonah’s 
patriotism, the eyes of the Lord were so 
focused on Israel that they would not see 
Jonah in Tarshish. A storm arises on the 
sea and the accusing lot falls on Jonah. 
He is a good deal of a man, admits his 
guilt, and asks that he be thrown over¬ 
board. Notice that he makes no change 
in his thought about Nineveh. He might 
have caused the Lord to stop the storm if 
he had promised to go to Nineveh; but he 
preferred drowning to going to Nineveh. 
Next the heathen sailors appear in fine 
light, even as compared with one of the 
chosen race, for they row hard to get to 
land to save Jonah, who has already cost 
them all their cargo and much of their 
ship’s gear. It was of no avail. Jonah 
had to go over the side of the vessel. And 
he went, expecting to sink straight to the 
bottom, and glad to sink rather than go to 
Nineveh. There was no way of escape, 
however, from Nineveh; and Jonah finally 
went—preaching to Ninevites with dis- 



CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 145 


gust, and beholding with disgust their 
turning to the Lord in repentance. One 
privilege, he thought, would in a measure 
compensate him for the humiliation of 
being in Nineveh at all. He would see 
Nineveh destroyed. He would see the fire 
fall from heaven and hear the enemies of 
the Lord scream in the terrors of death. 
When it appeared at last that the city was 
not to be destroyed, Jonah’s heart was 
broken. Then comes one of the loftiest 
passages in all literature: “Should not I 
have compassion on six-score thousand 
souls who know not their right hand from 
their left?” Who were these souls? Any 
commentator will tell us that these one 
hundred and twenty thousand persons 
could only have been children in the 
streets of Nineveh—ignorant and innocent 
of Assyrian cruelty. Jonah’s thought did 
not include young Ninevites in the cate¬ 
gory of children. To him Ninevite babies 
were cub-tigers. 

So paints the Old Testament the por¬ 
trait of Jonah the Jew, rightly loyal to his 
country; Jonah the patriot, who had to 
learn that the truth of God, which was the 


146 


LIVING TOGETHER 


peculiar glory of Israel, was to be held in 
trusteeship even for Nineveh; Jonah, the 
man, who had to come to see that he must 
think even of hated Nineveh in human 
terms, the terms of innocent children play¬ 
ing in the streets. If we could get our in¬ 
ternational relations to-day as far along as 
the teachings of Jonah the practical adjust¬ 
ments between nations would follow of them¬ 
selves. 


Let us, however, not stop with Jonah, 
but come close to the concrete facts of 
this year of our Lord, 1923. 

We have made some substantial gains in 
dealing with the war problem, the most 
substantial being that war now has few 
outright defenders. It is not far in the 
past that men like Admiral Mahan were 
virtually glorifying war and exalting the 
warrior type of human being. That day 
is past, even in the professional military 
circles. It is even no longer sacrilege to 
point out the limitations of the professional 
military intellect. An officer of high rank 
in the American army made the suggestion 
a few years ago that the unarmed condi- 



CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 147 


tion of our Northern frontier is fraught 
with peril to the United States. Every¬ 
body saw in this merely an instance of that 
aberration which comes to any intellect 
debauched in overspecialization. For the 
most part the professional soldier is slow 
to call for war, certainly slower than our 
half-baked civilian jingoes and imperialists. 

While, however, there is wide agreement 
on the undesirableness of war as such, and 
charitable amusement when even a mili¬ 
tary authority begins to talk about affairs 
outside his sphere, it takes the hero to 
stand against a particular war. It is for 
this reason that we shall have to make 
more and more place in our consideration 
for the one type of man in dead earnest 
in the anti-war warfare—for the conscien¬ 
tious objector against taking the life of 
men in any war. May I say at the outset 
that I am not myself a conscientious ob¬ 
jector as the term is technically used. I 
say this, not with anything like pride but 
with something like regret. I am not of 
the stuff of which that type of martyr is 
made. When a young man arises full of 
the heat of a sincere crusade against war 



148 


LIVING TOGETHER 


my feeling toward him is that of admira¬ 
tion for a quality of moral genius I am not 
likely to attain unto. If war is ever done 
away with, it will be because the view of 
the conscientious objector—like that of the 
abolitionist in antislavery movements—will 
become substantially the nucleus around 
which the more moderate sentiment finally 
crystallizes, the view, namely, that human 
life is so inherently sacred that it must not 
be poured out upon battlefields. No argu¬ 
ment will in the end avail against that 
insight. No argument thus far adduced 
against that argument has had anything 
more than mere expediency value. To say 
that the conscientious objector should not 
accept the protection of a society for which 
he will not fight would be funny if it were 
not so sad. A man who will submit to 
ridicule and physical indignity and im¬ 
prisonment for the sake of an admittedly 
transcendent ideal is fighting for society at 
least as truly as the man who kills his 
fellow men in battle. It is about time? 
also, that we took account of the fact that 
there is back of every war what a sugges¬ 
tive English writer—one of the editors of 




CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 149 


the Manchester Guardian—has called the 
unconscientious objector, the coward call¬ 
ing loudly for war and objecting to any 
risk for his own skin, searching for safe 
quarters from which to urge others to 
death. 

It is in objection to war that spiritual 
heroism burns bright, for there the hero¬ 
ism runs substantial risks. The reaction¬ 
ary has an excuse in dealing with such 
exalted spirits as sincerely conscientious 
objectors for going to any length. He can 
even persuade himself that in putting such 
dangerous lunatics, as he thinks of them, 
out of the way he is doing God’s service. 
Conscientious objection of the extreme type 
is for the most part outside of the church, 
and crusade against it easily secures the 
blessing of official ecclesiastics. The ground 
of forgiveness for such ecclesiastics is prob¬ 
ably that they know not what they do. 
They are persecuting those who, impractical 
as they may be, are spiritually akin to the 
early Christians who would not worship 
the Roman emperor or join the emperor’s 
legions. It is logically inconsistent and yet 
morally sound to admit that the conscien- 



150 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tious objector is foolish in face of what 
happens in this world to disarmed peoples 
like the Armenians; and to insist that the 
conscientious objector’s stress on the sacred¬ 
ness of human life is the way out. To say 
that slavery could not be put away except 
by a moderate-minded Lincoln is not to 
minimize the value of an uncompromising 
Garrison. It would be presumptuous indeed 
to urge young men to stand up against a 
war-mad state, especially when he who 
urges cannot himself see his way clear to 
make such a stand. When, however, those 
who conscientiously object do thus stand, 
they make life more Christian for all of us 
whose consciences are not so acute, or 
whose minds see practical, weighty objec¬ 
tions more alarmedly, or whose hearts are 
bowed down by the fear of involving in 
hardship friends and relatives for whom we 
feel heavy obligations. If such a saint 
arises, then, in any of our churches, let us 
thank God for the reproach and sting and 
questioning which he brings to those of us 
who sincerely cannot now follow with him. 
He helps keep Christianity Christian—pos¬ 
sibly he points the way also to a deep 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 151 


Christian experience. Those who deal with 
idealists of this type, and know how to 
distinguish between the shirker and the 
crack-brained on the one hand, and the 
martyrs and saints on the other, tell us 
that these objecting saints attain inwardly 
to a peace that passeth understanding—at 
least passing the understanding of the jingo 
ecclesiastic and the compromising priest. 
Of course that is not saying much, for 
neither jingo nor compromiser ever under¬ 
stands anything worth understanding. 
Jesus hinted at an understanding of the 
prophets reached by enduring persecution 
like theirs. A man who will denounce in¬ 
ternational inhumanity to-day with the 
directness with which Amos and Isaiah 
attacked such brutality in their day will 
learn more about Amos and Isaiah in one 
week after his outcry than he will learn 
from commentaries in a lifetime. The 
man who speaks for human value in the 
face of the mob’s cry “Crucify him!” will 
enter more deeply into an understanding 
of the spirit of the cross than by the study 
of libraries of theology. We shall not all 
be absolutist objectors to war. Differences 


152 


LIVING TOGETHER 


of all sorts prevent. Society might go to 
pieces if any absolute movement absolutely 
captured everybody, for one absolutism in¬ 
volves others. On the other hand, society 
would rot if it were not for the salt of 
absolute protest against international evil. 
Salt is a type of peacemaker—a symbol of 
reconciliation. There is no use of talking 
of living together if life itself is not worth 
living. Life is not worth living with a war 
every decade or two. 

After all, the conscientious objector may 
have more common sense than the rest of 
us. It seems absurd when the objector 
tells us he won’t fight and that the way to 
stop war is to stop fighting. That is too 
simple to be a divine inspiration. It is the 
simplicity of lunacy. Is it? There is a 
tradition from the old days of Methodist 
frontier circuiting-riding of a preacher who 
once started to swim the Ohio River on an 
errand of mercy. When he was nearly 
across his strength gave out and he felt he 
must drown. He commended his soul to 
God and said farewell to the world. Then 
the ridiculous thought flashed into his mind, 
“Better let down and see how deep the 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 153 


water is.” It seemed almost sacrilege to 
entertain such a thought after his mood of 
prayer, but he let down. The water was 
only five feet deep, and he walked ashore. 
At first he felt that the Lord had almost 
trifled with him after the exalted mood of 
submission to the divine will, but returning 
good sense showed that the practical im¬ 
pulse was a flash of divine wisdom. It 
may be that the absolutist’s call to the 
world to end war by stopping fighting is as 
divine as the old-time preacher’s impulse to 
cease struggling against the waves and walk 
ashore. In any event, the absolutist is the 
yeast of the peace movement. Yeast is not 
over-palatable itself, but it makes other 
things palatable. Antiwar movements are 
likely to flatten down into dead dough 
without the ferment of the absolutist’s in¬ 
sistence upon the inviolable sacredness of 
human life. 

Actual physical warfare, however, is not 
the only form of conflict between nations, 
and the reign of good will and of peace 
will not necessarily have arrived as soon as 
men shall have beaten their swords into 



154 


LIVING TOGETHER 


plowshares and their spears into pruning 
hooks. Plowshares and pruning hooks can 
be quite as fatal instruments of warfare 
between nations as swords and spears— 
and that, too, when the plowshares are 
busy in the furrows and the pruning hooks 
in the vineyards. Sometimes the man in 
the furrow says he cannot plow unless he 
is protected by a man with a gun, as in 
the old frontier days, when the plowman 
was preceded by a man with a rifle who 
walked at the horse’s head on the lookout 
for Indians. Those days have indeed 
passed, but there are still tillers of the soil 
who say that they cannot run their fur¬ 
rows unless the man with the gun will 
keep open world markets for their grain. 
So that it comes about that often the man 
behind the gun is the man with the plow. 
Let us trust that this day is passing. It 
means a violation of that rational good 
sense of which I spoke in an earlier para¬ 
graph. 

Suppose that a new day dawns and that 
the nations actually learn physical war no 
more. Are we now able to live together as 
nations? Not necessarily, for economic 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 155 


warfare through exclusive tariffs and other 
internationally restrictive measures may 
keep burning the spirit of hatred between 
nations. Since the days of Jesus we have 
heard that hatred keeps men out of the 
Kingdom, rather than actual blows with 
fists or clubs. I see no way to permanent 
peace between nations except as the na¬ 
tions learn to use their economic powers 
not as weapons of warfare but as bonds of 
union in service. 

Here someone breaks out that all this 
means the doctrine that government is to 
interfere more and more in business, 
whereas business ought to be allowed to 
develop according to its own laws—laws 
with which we trifle at our peril. The 
objector avows that what I am now saying 
trends in the direction of socialism. 

Will the objector please keep his seat for 
a minute while we look a few facts in the 
face! The question to-day is not whether 
government shall more and more concern 
itself with business, but whether govern¬ 
ment’s concern shall be in behalf of this or 
that special interest, or in behalf of the 
widest human interests. It may, indeed, 



156 


LIVING TOGETHER 


be according to the American tradition 
that government shall interfere as little as 
possible with business, but it has been the 
American practice since the days of the 
Civil War that business shall control gov¬ 
ernment as much as possible. How de¬ 
lightful to hear the shouter for high tariffs 
tell us that government should not inter¬ 
fere with economic movements! Let us 
make all concession to the upholder of 
tariffs. Let us concede that the horror of 
the Cobden Free Trade School at the fos¬ 
tering of American industries by protective 
tariffs was ill-considered, that America did 
wisely to build up her own industries rather 
than to fulfill the role of agricultural com¬ 
missary to manufacturing England. Make 
the case for the tariff just as strong as we 
can, there is nevertheless no getting away 
from the fact that a tariff between nations 
is an interference by government in busi¬ 
ness, an interference with the free working 
of economic forces, an interference in prin¬ 
ciple just as radical, as far as it goes, as any 
economic expedient that socialism proposes. 
The high-tariff protectionist is the last man 
who has any right to protest against so- 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 157 

cialism because socialism brings governmen¬ 
tal activities into business. Whether the 
protest continues or not, government will 
more and more concern itself with business. 
Our hope is that the concern will take more 
and more into account the moral outcome 
of international financial adjustments. 

Our hope, we repeat, is that the adjust¬ 
ments will be more and more in terms of 
all-inclusive human welfare, ruled by inter¬ 
national agreement, backed up by an in¬ 
creasing international sentiment on the 
part of the mass of the voting population. 
We talk truly of capitalism as an interna¬ 
tional force. Why not talk about labor 
also—in the widest sense—as an interna¬ 
tional force? The ordinary “plain man” of 
Abraham Lincoln, especially if he be a 
toiler for his daily bread, can be depended 
upon, once he is informed, to act with 
quite as much soundness of international 
judgment as the capitalist. The plain man 
is quite as likely to respond to an appeal 
for sacrifice as the capitalist. In the days 
of our Civil War the Lancashire cotton 
workers voluntarily went down into un¬ 
complaining poverty to sustain the North- 



158 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ern cause, which they felt to be the cause 
of free labor the world over. 

These suggestions of unselfish, even sac¬ 
rificial, international action are not desper¬ 
ate and crazy when viewed in the light of 
what actually goes on in smaller circles. 
As an illustration take the differential 
freight rate on railroads between the grain 
fields of the West and the cities of the 
Atlantic seaboard. For years it was true— 
perhaps it is still true—that Boston and 
Baltimore were granted advantages in 
freight rates as over against New York, so 
that they might not be too far left behind 
in commercial competition. More than 
once I have heard New York business lead¬ 
ers declare against this differential as an 
interference with natural economic move¬ 
ment. Possibly the railroad leaders who 
devised the differential scheme were not 
moved by altrustic ideals. Perhaps the 
railroads benefited. Nevertheless, the 
scheme was in the direction of sound social 
policy. Boston and Baltimore are estab¬ 
lished cities of immense social value. The 
differential was and is socially justified as 
lending them support, even if the support 




CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 159 


in part has nullified New York’s natural 
geographic advantage, even if, in effect, it 
has partially closed up the Mohawk Gap. 
So with many sound schemes of railroad 
pooling and centralization. The stronger 
roads have to bear a share of the burden of 
the weak, with no prospect of adequately 
remunerative financial return, for the gen¬ 
eral material welfare. 

All I am trying to say is that economic 
forces are daily interfered with for a social 
result. Moreover, American national de¬ 
velopment would not have been possible if 
a group of States like those of the American 
nation had not come into practical coopera¬ 
tion rather than competition with one an¬ 
other. There is rivalry between differing 
States of our nation, no doubt, but the ele¬ 
ment of cooperation is stronger than the 
element of competition between them, and 
cooperation implies a sharing of losses as 
well as of gains. 

I do not think we need go as far as an 
actual merging of nations to put ourselves 
in the path toward supplanting interna¬ 
tional competition, competition which may 
be a form of war with nations almost lit- 


160 


LIVING TOGETHER 


erally killing one another, by a cooperation 
which is a form of national living together. 
Take an extreme illustration, which is, after 
all, not beyond the range of conceivability. 
Here is a tropical country producing a 
given kind of vegetable, the sale of whose 
product gives that country its only chance 
toward economic prosperity. Botanists and 
chemists discover that with the aid of a 
tariff that tropical product can be produced 
and sold at a lower price in a temperate 
than in the tropical clime. Is it beyond 
reason to fancy that a majority of voters 
may say, “No, we will not aid in the arti¬ 
ficial production of a plant which gives 
millions of people in another land their 
only chance at adequate human life”? It 
might even come to pass that the con¬ 
suming public would refuse to buy pro¬ 
ducts at a cheaper price than they could 
be produced by such tropical fruit-growers, 
for the sake of giving the tropical land its 
chance. Within more or less limited cir¬ 
cles the natural laws of trade—buy as 
cheaply as you can and sell as dearly as you 
can—are being set at naught all the time. 

Of course, all this implies some world 



CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 1GI 

organization, but it does not necessarily 
imply a world-state. To put such a scheme 
into effect we do not have to wait till the 
millennium. The organization of the 
United States into a federation under the 
Constitution at once spread peace over a 
wider area of the world’s surface than had 
ever been known up to the time of the 
organization, and the federation was not at 
the beginning the tight texture it is to-day. 
The Constitution of the United States may, 
indeed, have been the greatest work struck 
off at a given instant by the human mind, 
in the words of Gladstone, or it may have 
been at the outset a contrivance to protect 
property interests, in the words of some 
present-day critics, but it was a step for¬ 
ward in any event, a step which can con¬ 
ceivably be paralleled in some organization 
born of respect for human interests on a 
world-wide scale, an organization, rudimen¬ 
tary at first, which will not put any in¬ 
superable strain on the world’s constructive 
intellect, certainly no more strain than that 
involved in carrying out to wider applica¬ 
tion a few international principles already 
in actual use. _ 



162 


LIVING TOGETHER 


A final comment on all the above is that 
just as economic forces are a sort of second 
line in actual warfare, so the public opinion 
of various nations is mobilized in war also 
as the determining power. War starts with 
the clash of arms. The clash of arms set¬ 
tles down to a physical deadlock in trenches 
while the economic forces of the fighting 
nations wear themselves out. Still the end 
of the war does not come until the spirit of 
one fighting group, or of all the groups, is 
broken. The battle is in the end that of 
public opinion against public opinion. 

This being so, it is the duty of Chris¬ 
tianity to bless all the forms of interna¬ 
tionalism that help on to understanding 
between nations. While some scope must 
be left to the deliberate attempt to make 
the various peoples see eye to eye, we 
come back again and again to our chief 
thesis—the result can be better reached in 
uniting in common world-wide efforts. 
Hence the duty of furthering all forms of 
international cooperation to worthy ends. 
If the nations say: “Go to, now let us 
journey each to the land of others and all 
cultivate one another’s good will,” we shall 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 163 


not get much farther than in similar ven¬ 
tures in personal life. If there are common 
tasks into which we can throw ourselves, 
we may find ourselves together without 
much raising of the question as to union. 
International combat against disease and 
against various evil traffickings does some¬ 
thing; international finance, something; in¬ 
ternational labor agreements and confer¬ 
ences, more still; international science, 
something; international churches could be 
of immense help if they would cut out the 
cancer of ecclesiastical imperialism. “Na¬ 
tions! Love one another!” This sounds 
fine, but it is about as potent as to tell 
two human beings to love one another. If 
a match-maker, set on getting a young man 
and young woman to loving one another, 
were to preach, “Love one another,” he 
would probably drive the two apart. So in 
larger affairs. If a common task is set 
before nations the mutual regard may come 
of itself. 

Is there not danger that through all this 
preaching of international community of 
feeling the distinctiveness of different na¬ 
tions may die out? Public opinion in any 


164 


LIVING TOGETHER 


one nation is a terrible leveling engine when 
it takes to driving ahead like a continent¬ 
wide steam roller. If we had an interna¬ 
tional public opinion would not all liberal 
social ideas be crushed in the bud? Would 
not the separate nations stagnate? It is 
hard to believe that this objection is seri¬ 
ously urged. Are wars and the rumors of 
war between nations spurs to social prog¬ 
ress? Is it not true that the oldest trick 
in the reactionary’s box of tricks is to 
raise with ridiculous frequency the cry of 
war, that the nations may be distracted 
from social reform? If we had even a loose 
confederation of nations, there would soon 
be enough mutual understanding among the 
groups so that social experiments might be 
better made than now. No one wants 
uniformity among nations. If one nation 
is prompted to try out a new social order, 
the new order will come more quickly to 
success or failure in a society of nations 
mutually respecting one another than in a 
society where the tendency up and down 
can be stopped by war scares. One factor 
in preventing the world’s finding out what 
Bolshevism actually is, by the course of its 


CAN PATRIOTISM BE SAVED? 165 


own natural unfolding, has been that all 
the curses of Lenin and Trotzky against 
capitalism have seemed to Russians to be 
warranted by the attitude of capitalistic 
nations toward Russia. 

On the whole, public opinion gives a 
pretty good account of itself when con¬ 
fronted with the possibility of social change. 
If the propagandists can be brought to tell 
the truth, public opinion is inclined to give 
social and political experiments their 
chance. In a cooperative group of nations 
there is every reason to believe that the 
separate nations would get a better chance 
to be themselves and to live their own lives 
than they do in to-day’s fancied independ¬ 
ence. Possibly the best patriot in the end 
is the one who shouts for all the other 
nations as well as for his own. 

Patriotism can be saved only on condi¬ 
tion that it be led to Christian rebirth, 
birth out of the world of selfishness into 
the world of service. We need as Chris¬ 
tians to remind ourselves that we worship 
a covenant-God, a God whose nature is 
Christlike indeed, but whose Christlikeness 
is fundamentally moral. God is under no 


166 


LIVING TOGETHER 


obligation continually to bless a fighting 
world. If the people cannot learn to live 
together, there is no fatalistic optimism 
which calls for the continuance of the inane 
spectacle of warfare. After the race has 
killed off its best members, evolution might 
conceivably run backward and downhill, 
with the light of human life finally sput¬ 
tering and flickering out, to the vast relief 
of all intelligences in the universe. We do 
not expect the resources of divine power 
to be thus foiled; but if such tragedy should 
be the outcome, what could we say but that 
the judgments of the Lord are true and 
righteous altogether? If we are to avoid 
such an outcome, patriotism must expe¬ 
rience Christian salvation. An unregener¬ 
ate patriotism will inevitably burn up the 
riches of the earth, destroy the race, and 
leave a blackened globe—a cosmic pile of 
ashes—as a monument to human fatuity, 
imbecility, and selfishness. 



V 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 

One of the age-old human conflicts is 
that between science and religion. One of 
the perennial struggles toward reconcilia¬ 
tion is that which would bring science and 
religion to live together amicably. 

It would be a waste of time to try to 
sketch out the changing phases of this so- 
called warfare between science and religion. 
Much of the conflict has depended upon 
misunderstanding of terms, and misunder¬ 
standing, also, of the proper territories and 
frontiers of the two contending factions. 
Any conflict measurably lessens when the 
contestants begin to realize their own 
limitations. Both science and religion have 
been considerably chastened by the discus¬ 
sions of the last half century, and the signs 
of mutual regard and concession to-day are 
more plentiful than ever before. 

In intellectual, as in other battles, a gain 
is made when the opponents arrive at mutual 
respect. This discussion will show, I trust, 

167 


168 


LIVING TOGETHER 


that science and religion have arrived or 
are arriving at such respect. As in most 
battles, in some particulars science has won 
outright; in others, religion has won out¬ 
right; in others still there is legitimate 
compromise or, at least, treaty of peace. 
In some aspects of this conflict there has 
been agreed-upon delimitation of territory; 
in some there is manifest a willingness, 
even an eagerness, on both sides for co¬ 
operation. To speak in terms of physics, 
in some encounters there has been direct 
collision, with the stronger force winning a 
victory over the weaker. In others, two 
forces, meeting as at an angle, have been 
compounded into a new force acting with 
a changed direction. In still others the 
forces have purposely merged together, 
uniting their powers. 

We now know the nature of the conflict 
better than ever. We know that we are 
dealing not with absolute entities—science 
and religion—arrayed against each other. 
There is no such absolute as science, no 
such absolute as religion. There are human 
beings, some of them more or less scientific, 
some of them more or less religious, though 



BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 169 


even here we get into the fog when we try 
to define terms sharply enough to divide 
classes. Many a saint is scientific without 
knowing it, and many a scientist is reli¬ 
gious without suspecting his own piety. 
The recognition of this decidedly human 
aspect of our problems enables us to get 
our bearings at the same time that we give 
up our sharpness of classificatory distinc¬ 
tions. Incidentally, we learn to discount 
the dogmatist, either scientific or eccle¬ 
siastic. Possibly the long, long conflict has 
not been between science and religion as 
such at all, but between dogmatic ecclesias¬ 
tics and dogmatic scientists. The con¬ 
fusion has been increased by the complica¬ 
tions which come out of organization on 
the one side and on the other. Organized 
Christianity is not necessarily always reli¬ 
gious, and the scientific mind sometimes 
organizes its pronouncements into ortho¬ 
doxies which are not scientific. 


One long step toward peace, we repeat, is 
in the discovery that each group of con¬ 
testants has its limitations. There are 
some questions that science cannot answer; 



170 


LIVING TOGETHER 


some that religion cannot answer. Science 
concerns itself chiefly with the processes by 
which events come to pass; with the formu¬ 
las and laws which tell us how changes 
happen and how forces act. The religious 
leader arises with a standard of moral and 
spiritual values to tell us what results are 
worth after they are achieved. To take an 
illustration from a less debatable field, 
think of the distinction between an artist 
and a scientist. The scientist can tell us 
how a glorious sunset, for example, or a 
pageant of color at dawn, comes about. 
He knows the laws of light and of color. 
The artist, who may understand none of 
these laws, can point out the aesthetic 
charm of the sunset. There is no reason 
for a fight between artists and scientists as 
long as the artists stick to art and the 
scientists stick to science. So also with 
scientific statements and religious interpre¬ 
tations. 

In outline, I think, the above commonly 
accepted delimitation of the field between 
science and religion will have to stand. 
Practically, it does not carry us far. The 
problem is more complex than such a sum- 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 171 


mary would indicate, just because we are 
treating not with an abstract science and 
an abstract religion, but with human beings 
who are at the same time more or less both 
scientific and religious. The scientific man 
often carries into his science religious or 
antireligious assumptions, and the religious 
man often carries into his devotional medi¬ 
tation scientific or antiscientific assump¬ 
tions. It will not suffice, therefore, to trace 
a boundary between science and religion 
and tell each to keep on its own side of the 
fence. Theoretically, religion as the study 
of values, and science as the study of meth¬ 
ods and processes, are sharply distinguished. 
Practically, since we are dealing with 
human beings, scientific and religious think¬ 
ing get badly mixed up. Let us call atten¬ 
tion, then, to the need of keeping the as¬ 
sumptions of science clear. If the physicist 
assumes that matter and force are all, God, 
freedom, and immortality will be ruled out 
—ruled out not because the physicist has 
proved scientifically that they do not exist, 
but because materialistic philosophy has 
interfered in his investigations. The reli¬ 
gious man likewise may avow that his 


172 


LIVING TOGETHER 


faith convinces him that events in the 
spiritual realm have happened by certain 
definite processes. He is not talking faith 
at all—possibly he is uttering poor science. 
Both in religious and scientific thinking we 
need to remember to watch the assump¬ 
tion. It is the recognition of this need that 
is making in part for increased charity be¬ 
tween men of science and men of religion. 
Both walk by faith, the scientist by faith 
in a method or theory, the religionist by 
faith in a spiritual value or a doctrine. 
The man of science is learning his lesson 
fully as well as the man of religion. The 
scientist is more and more seeing that ex¬ 
pectations and theories play quite as effec¬ 
tively in leading him into scientific truth or 
error as do his test tubes and his lenses, 
and he is scrutinizing the theories. No 
irremediable harm can come if the assump¬ 
tions are openly recognized and their sig¬ 
nificance taken into the philosophic ac¬ 
count. 

As a current illustration of the extent to 
which assumption works in determining the 
findings of students even in a most objec¬ 
tive field, think of two interpretations of 



BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 173 


the Einstein doctrine. Einstein comes for¬ 
ward with a theory of space and time which 
claims to do away with the possibility of 
any one all-embracing space or of any one 
all-embracing time such as appear to be 
assumed in the doctrines of Newton. Ein¬ 
stein’s own space and time seem to be 
pretty closely interwoven—but there is no 
absolute cosmic space-standard or time- 
standard by reference to which different 
relative spaces and times can be brought 
into unity—we have not space and time, 
but as many spaces and times as we have 
observers. Now comes Viscount Haldane, 
a thinker of scientific habit, devoted to an 
idealistic philosophy. He hails Einstein as 
the greatest intellect of the last two hun¬ 
dred years, and sees in his theory almost a 
final seal set upon idealism because of the 
apparent emphasis of Einstein on pre¬ 
dominantly mental construction in space 
and time. The physicist has driven matter 
as self-existent stuff out of the universe, 
replacing it with forces in space. Einstein 
has gone a step further and has delivered 
us from bondage to self-existent space. As 
Haldane passes on Bertrand Russell ap- 


174 


LIVING TOGETHER 


pears, a mathematical philosopher of quite 
definitely atheistic bent, and acclaims 
Einstein as having set space and time 
free from mental construction or, at least, 
as having provided a space and time 
in which something outside of and indif¬ 
ferent to mind goes on under its own laws. 
Russell is so set against pragmatism, or 
against any system which seems to let the 
human-will-to-believe count, that he ap¬ 
pears at times to make the will-not-to- 
believe determinative of truth; but his in¬ 
terests in a preconceived outcome are just 
as marked as Haldane’s. Manifestly, a 
thinker can accept Einstein and be either 
a theist or an atheist. The Einstein geom¬ 
etry and mathematics are what they are. 
Einstein states the formulas, and the theist 
believes in God, just as before, while the 
atheist finds new reason for not believing 
in God. Einstein himself is apparently not 
particularly concerned, one way or the 
other. Very likely he does not care over¬ 
much what either Haldane or Russell is 
saying. In his own expositions he sticks 
so closely to mathematics and astronomy 
that the element of assumption seems re- 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 175 


duced to a minimum—though he himself is 
moving on a most overwhelming assump¬ 
tion, namely, that a human rrqnd on an 
insignificant planet, which is a cosmic speck 
floating as a beam in the light, can read 
off the secrets of the astronomical universe 
with an exactness finer than a hair’s 
breadth. 

By the way, it is always interesting to 
note how those who rule mind out of the 
universe do so in the name of mind. Here 
is Einstein’s theory, built on the most ex¬ 
traordinary intellectual achievements. His 
instrument is a theory of tensors, of which, 
it is said, only a dozen men have any ade¬ 
quate knowledge—an intellectual appara¬ 
tus uniformly characterized as powerful. 
The power must have existed in the mind 
which created the apparatus. Yet this 
wholly intellectual instrument manipulated 
by a thinker like Bertrand Russell is a tool 
for exorcising mind from the universe! 
Mind, in the name of mind, says to mind, 
“There is no mind.” If mind counts for 
nothing in the universe, it is mind itself 
that has found out its own weakness. A 
mind strong enough to discover its own 



176 


LIVING TOGETHER 


weakness is fairly strong. If this seems not 
quite fair, let us consider that mind, after 
all, is the discoverer of what even the 
scientist thinks of as the facts about the 
universe, and that the discovery of physi¬ 
cal truth, depending as it does upon 
tremendously intense putting forth of 
intellectual energy, is itself a phenomenon 
to be explained. If we could think of 
mind as a mere passive somewhat on which 
a universe prints a picture of itself, we 
would have one problem—provided we 
could find some mind to see the picture— 
but nobody can look upon the mathemati¬ 
cal processes by which astronomical truth 
is caught in equations and think of mind as 
passive. If the materialist means that 
mind has no materially creative force in 
the universe, his argument is at least in¬ 
telligible, but when he goes on to show 
that mind is a passive accompaniment of 
physical process he is talking nonsensical 
paradox, in face of the elaborately subtle 
and powerful intellectual machinery with 
which his own mind does its work. It 
would take quite a different type of 
matter from any we know to be able 



BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 177 


materialistically to account for Einstein’s 
tensors. 


To get back to our main path, we find 
growing understanding between religious 
thinkers and scientific thinkers in the in¬ 
creasing recognition by open-minded reli¬ 
gious teachers of what we all call the 
scientific temper. The publication of the 
biographies of leading scientists has been 
almost as productive of spiritual nourish¬ 
ment for the religiously minded as has the 
publication of the lives of the saints. The 
genuine scientist, like the genuine saint, 
has been better than the organization of 
which he is a part, though scientists, ar¬ 
tists, and saints would never come to their 
best if they were not aided by the coopera¬ 
tive effort of “schools.” A school of scien¬ 
tists, or an organized body of scientists, 
however, soon develops its own brand of 
scientific orthodoxy o It acquires vested 
interests in the teaching of its theories. It 
gets snobbish and pharisaical in the use of 
the scales it manufactures to test scientific 
orthodoxy. All the objections that can be 
urged against the dogmatism and pharisa- 



178 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ism and bigotry of religious orthodoxy, once 
it hardens into organization, can be urged 
against science, once it ossifies into the 
final stages of organization. In fact, the 
more truly religious leaders and the more 
truly scientific leaders often find a basis of 
union in the clash with the same sorts of 
dogmatic foes who appear both in the reli¬ 
gious and in the scientific ranks. 

All this apart, the true saint and the 
true scientist are much alike. The saint 
seeks to follow God’s will whithersoever it 
leads him and the scientist follows truth 
whithersoever it leads him. The saint 
learns God’s will by childlike openness of 
mind—by patient waiting day after day 
for truth to unfold itself, by willingness to 
receive the truth for its own worth when 
once it appears, regardless of the quarter 
whence it has actually arrived. The same 
description will serve word for word to set 
forth the character of the scientist. The 
great scientists and the great saints are 
much alike. 

We have been trying to say all along 
that the final bond of union between 
groups is that of cooperation toward a 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 179 


common end. The religious mind and the 
scientific mind are more and more cooper¬ 
ating in the name of the self-evident human 
ideals—are seeking to render the vastest 
possible human service. 

Here we hear the voice of protest. Many 
a religionist will have it that even when 
science is not hostile to religion it is so set 
on facts for facts’ sake that the result is 
the same. The scientist cares for facts as 
facts, and only as facts. This charge is 
sometimes welcomed by the scientist him¬ 
self. He avows that science cannot flourish 
on human interests; especially must it cast 
out all taint of practical consideration. 

Practical interests are one thing; human 
interests may be another. The scientist is 
justified in protesting against the emphasis 
on utilitarian considerations in scientific re¬ 
search. He points out that the most im¬ 
portant practical results of science have 
been made possible as the outcome of the 
discoveries of students with no bread-and- 
butter aim. Of course, if the objector is 
not careful, he will reinstate the practical 
aim by such argument, but in the main the 
point is well taken. Still, we are not rid 


180 


LIVING TOGETHER 


of the human reference. In the contempla¬ 
tion of the most abstract mathematical 
truth there is always implied the delight 
which the truth gives, or may give, the 
onlooker. The scientist may feel a positive 
thrill of delight at a discovery. He burns 
to communicate the discovery to others. 
“The discovery is so significant,” he says; 
but significance is significant only in ref¬ 
erence to a mind. The scientist talks 
about the consistency of his results as they 
hold together in a logical plan, of the de¬ 
pendence of parts one on another, of the 
self-sufficient beauty of the scientific hy¬ 
pothesis. Mind — mind — mind — all 
through! The discovery has come out of 
the pressure of mental interests. So the 
scientist and the seeker after religion in 
the end set on high the contemplation of 
truth as a lordly human aim. In lofty 
theory of the working of the forces of the 
universe the saint declares that his soul is 
fed by thinking God’s thoughts after him 
—that, too, without any reference to the 
utilitarian character of the thoughts. The 
scientist may not be willing to admit that 
he is seeking to ennoble the human mind 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 181 


by setting before it the vastest thought, 
but that is what he is doing nevertheless. 
He may not speak outright of God, but he 
has given mighty content to the idea of 
God. He has stretched out the spaces be¬ 
tween suns and stars and given longer 
radius for the leap of the divine forces. 
The scientist has not, we repeat, given us 
a God, but he has expanded and made 
massive the idea of God which we already 
have. 

This, however, is perhaps too quantita¬ 
tive in its suggestiveness. The scientist 
has forced upon the upholder of religion a 
more qualitative idea of the divine working, 
which is being more and more welcomed by 
the religious thinker—the idea of the per¬ 
vasion of the activities of the world through¬ 
out with law. This insistence upon law, 
upon regularity in the procedure of the 
forces of the universe, is the best single 
contribution which the scientist has made 
to the progress of religion. We are to-day 
everywhere interpreting the forces of the 
universe as the activities of the Divine 
Agent here and now. If we can just get 
fast hold of that idea, we shall see that 


182 


LIVING TOGETHER 


every additional formulation of a law of 
nature is a further hint of the regularity of 
the divine mind. We shall see that the 
scientist and the preacher should work to¬ 
gether to discover law in the working of 
the world. God saves men by the meth¬ 
ods of psychological movement; he reveals 
himself to men by processes which the his¬ 
torical student can grasp and state; he 
carries out his will through organizations 
which must work according to ascertain¬ 
able group laws. 

What, then, becomes of miracle? Mir¬ 
acle as the manifestation of the working of 
a force whose law we have not yet learned, 
or miracle as the expression of the unique 
working of unique spiritual power, or mir¬ 
acle on any terms that make it the mani¬ 
festation of a law-observing God, will stay; 
but miracle as the sign of lawlessness, or 
of breaking of the law, or of arbitrary ir¬ 
regularity will go. It is odd that in dis¬ 
cussion of miracles some of those who 
clamor for miracle as the setting aside of 
law do not see that the sinners are the 
miracle-workers, on such a definition. Sin¬ 
ners are the setters-aside of the law. The 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 183 


saint works the higher miracle of seizing 
and utilizing law. Certain extraordinary 
occurrences in the scriptural revelation will 
probably always be accepted as facts. The 
religious interpretation of those facts will 
more and more bring them into line with 
the idea of a rationally working Agent 
whose laws are the expression of supreme 
wisdom. There is almost a tinge of sac¬ 
rilege in some theological insistence that 
God shall set aside laws. The laws are an 
expression of the divine nature. It is a 
curious twist of mind that seeks to set 
aside a law which, in the Christian view 
of the world, is the sign of divine regu¬ 
larity, in the name of the search for intel¬ 
ligence in the World-Agent. 

The purpose of that Agent both scien¬ 
tists and teachers of religion will have to 
leave to faith. Why things are as they 
are is, of course, the mystery of mysteries, 
and the mere inspection of nature’s proc¬ 
esses cannot fully answer us. More and 
more does pain in the human and animal 
realms become opaque mystery. Still, 
there is no reason why we should make 
the facts darker than they are. The scien- 


184 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tist assumes an intelligible universe and an 
orderly plan. These help and help mightily 
as the man of faith announces his faith. It 
helps also to realize more and more that 
the scientist as such no longer seeks to 
disprove the essentials on which religious 
faith builds—at least, the scientist who un¬ 
derstands himself. Take the intimate cor¬ 
relation which to-day we know to exist 
between physical and mental processes. 
There is no use blinking the fact that 
many and many a scientist believes that 
this connection is so close that mind is 
essentially and always subordinate to mat¬ 
ter; but this is belief and not proof. Why 
get alarmed, moreover, at the statement of 
such materialism in specific terms when we 
have always had to deal with it in general 
terms? Ever since men knew anything 
they seem to have known that thinking 
somehow has to do with a man’s head. If 
we can make an adjustment to that age- 
old conception, why get excited when some 
one tells us specifically that particular 
forms of thinking have to do with par¬ 
ticular parts of the head and that to cut 
out these parts will stop that kind of think- 


r 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 185 

ing? We have always known the general 
truth that if we strike a man’s head, the 
man may stop thinking, and we do not 
accept materialism because of that univer¬ 
sally admitted fact. Again, we have al¬ 
ways known that given bodily states have 
significance in influencing some manifes¬ 
tations of human character. Here is a 
man in a violent outbreak of temper. We 
say that he is not himself, that he is be¬ 
side himself, that he is sick. The general 
effect of bodily states on the manifestation 
of moral states has always been known. 
Why worry if some physiological psychol¬ 
ogist shows the connection between the 
working of particular glands and some 
manifestations of moral character? The 
strict scientist admits that this proves 
nothing more than a dependence which 
may be merely a feature of an earthly 
existence. Faith does not consist in be¬ 
lieving in spite of disproof. It believes in 
putting the best construction on what we 
know, and of assuming the best where we 
do not know. 


A moment ago I spoke of the tendency 



186 


LIVING TOGETHER 


of the scientist to be somewhat disparaging 
of the more practical interests. May I say 
here that since we live in a work-a-day 
world, the field in which men of religion 
and men of science are coming more closely 
together is that of the practical work of 
the relief of human suffering and the re¬ 
lease of human energies. The man of reli¬ 
gion is trying more and more to use the 
scientific method in the spirit of Christ— 
and is not the man of science fundamen¬ 
tally doing the same, even when he may 
not name the name of Christ? How far 
would a scientist get to-day if he should 
flatly declare that he will not work in a 
Christly spirit, that he will think only of 
himself, that he will make all the money 
he can, that he will be absolutely cold¬ 
blooded and selfish? That is not the spirit 
of science. The scientist and the preacher 
work together to make the world a better 
place in which to live. 

Suppose we think of the actual recon¬ 
ciliations manifested in a well-ordered hos¬ 
pital of to-day, a hospital which, if you 
please, is controlled and supported by a 
church. The hospital is impossible with- 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 187 


out a respect on the part of the scientists 
for the aim of the church as seeking to 
minister to human need, and without a 
realization on the part of the church au¬ 
thorities that it is useless to open the 
hospital doors without the aid of scientists. 
By the side of every operating table and 
every cot are at work theories of disease 
and cure which would have been heresies a 
century ago. The whole conception of 
sickness as a punishment upon the indi¬ 
vidual for his personal sins is a monstrosity 
in a hospital. If a doctor or a nurse should 
insist upon treating sick people primarily 
as sinners deserving of penalty, there would 
be at once an outcry from the church as 
well as from science. The idea that pain 
is to be banished as far as possible was 
formerly itself under the ban of theolo¬ 
gians who held that to annihilate pain was 
to minimize the curse which the fall of man 
laid upon the race. The atmosphere of a 
hospital is charged with reconciliations be¬ 
tween science and religion, to say nothing 
of reconciliations between scientists and 
scientists and believers and believers. Pain 
is no respecter of creeds—and the treat- 


188 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ment of pain is the same for the creed- 
holders and creed-rejectors. Theories of 
microbic processes which once divided 
scientists into warring camps now bind the 
erstwhile combatants together. It calls for 
but slight effort of imagination to carry 
through on the world-wide scale this dream 
of reconciliation as, all over the world, 
men of a Christ spirit seek to make the 
scientific method work in the spirit of 
Christ. Science itself is one of the indis¬ 
pensable agencies of the Christian recon¬ 
ciliation, for science itself can hardly 
progress except as it seeks for a world 
community and a world sphere in which 
to move. 


These considerations may give us an 
avenue of approach to the problem of 
how to deal with forward movements in 
churches where the progress is the out¬ 
come of the spirit of science, or the temper 
of science, working through the churchmen. 
In our thought of the function of the theo¬ 
logical leader let us remember that all 
progress in adaptation between older theol¬ 
ogies and newer views made necessary by 



BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 189 

scientific advance passes through well- 
marked stages. Almost any new view is at 
first met with opposition. There is at the 
beginning fierce fighting. The opening at¬ 
tack declares that the new idea is heresy. 
After the fighting cools down there is grad¬ 
ual acceptance of the supposed heresy, 
with the avowal that it is a matter of 
indifference whether we accept it or not. 
The view is pronounced harmless in any 
case. Finally arrives the stage at which 
the view is widely accepted as an essential, 
or, at least, an important contribution to 
human thinking. The view at last be¬ 
comes itself thoroughly orthodox, and we 
may even think of it as belonging to that 
self-evident truth which men have always 
believed. 

The first contribution that the so-called 
innovator makes is in raising his question 
at all—or insisting upon his right to ques¬ 
tion. Any organization of truth, especially 
of religious truth, is safe only when the 
questioner is at hand. Orthodoxies of all 
kinds, religious or scientific alike, are so¬ 
cially permissible only on condition that 
they stand out in the open where what 



190 


LIVING TOGETHER 


William James called the northwest wind of 
free inquiry can roar around them. Theol¬ 
ogy must meet the questioning of every 
age, and the questioner is performing an 
indispensable social and religious function. 
The more closely and compactly organized 
religious truth becomes, the more the need 
of scrutiny, for in the nature of truth—a 
nature which implies organic adjustments 
and readjustments and living change and 
rebirth—anything suggestive of overorgani¬ 
zation smacks of error. The more a church 
becomes sure of its formal theology the 
more need for the questioner. 

A further service rendered by the sayer 
of new things is just that of making the 
new conception familiar. The ordinary 
man in church or out of church gets over 
his fear as he becomes more familiar with 
the fearful. Here is a heretic who keeps on 
announcing his heresy year after year. If, 
now, the heretic is driven out of the 
church, an element of persecuting force has 
been brought to play which prevents the 
consideration of the heresy on its merits. 
Persecution sometimes does harm in lead¬ 
ing to the spread of persecuted doctrines 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 191 

which ought not to be spread. Suppose, 
on the other hand, the heretic goes on with¬ 
out interruption, in full and free discussion. 
The heavens do not fall. If the idea is 
absurd, its absurdity is seen through after 
a while. If it is sound, the soundness be¬ 
comes apparent. The idea becomes fa¬ 
miliar. Perhaps even the heretic, on his 
own account, sees his own weakness, after 
a while. 

The best resolution for a church to make 
in dealing with a rising generation of 
youths filled with the new wine of a rather 
raw scientific progressiveness is to cultivate 
a shock-proof nervous stability. For many 
years I have been frequently holding per¬ 
sonal interviews with college students on 
matters of religious faith and practice. I 
have listened to veritable processions of 
twenty-year-old atheists and anarchists as 
they have banished God out of the uni¬ 
verse and order from human society. More 
than once I have seen the youthful philos¬ 
opher stop and say with a boyish grin, in 
response to a calm “What of it?” “Well, it 
does sound rather stupid, now that I have 
talked it out.” 


192 


LIVING TOGETHER 


Sometimes the “What of it?” has to 
recognize that in all honesty there is a 
great deal to be squarely met and fairly 
treated. At any rate, it is the business of 
the church to press to close quarters with 
the question which has been raised—close 
enough to it to rob it of all advantage it 
may possess through sheer strangeness, or 
of terror through unfamiliarity. 

It is well for us all to remember also the 
part played by the pioneer in pushing new 
ideas out to extreme statement. What is 
balance in religious thinking? A steadi¬ 
ness so stiff that there is no rolling of the 
ship? Such steadiness is likely to cut 
down the speed. Balance is such construc¬ 
tion that the boat can roll considerably 
without upsetting. In the history of both 
scientific and religious ideas progress comes 
as various doctrines are carried out to their 
logical extremes in statement. In state¬ 
ment, I say, for the inertia of human na¬ 
ture is on the whole a safeguard against 
any doctrine’s being widely carried to an 
extreme in practice. We cannot always 
understand a doctrine till it is given its 
farthest conceivable putting. Hence, there 



BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 193 


is a stage in the development of every doc¬ 
trine when its advocates make it explain 
everything. It does not explain every¬ 
thing, but the far-fetched putting enables 
us to get at the truth or the falsity. In the 
end the conception from which the advo¬ 
cate expected everything may find itself 
filling a disappointingly small niche in the 
temple of human philosophy, but it might 
not have occupied even that without the 
extravagant expositions of its supporters. 

If anyone is terrified at any of the above 
suggestions, let it be remembered that we 
are taking certain conditions for granted. 
We are assuming, above all, that we are 
dealing with servants of the church in 
search of the truth. If some reader is 
inclined to think that all this would war¬ 
rant a religious thinker’s swinging clear 
over into atheism so as to make the most 
of a scientific theory, let him ask himself 
how many theologians are likely to do this, 
or how many would be willing to remain 
inside the church if they became atheists. 
We assume, also, that not all the members 
of a church are likely to be extremists 
themselves or to yield overmuch to ex- 


194 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tremism. We are thinking of the place 
and function in the church of the earnest, 
scientifically minded youth who is burning 
with the passion of the intellectual cru¬ 
sader. We insist that there are not likely 
to be enough of such crusaders at any one 
time to do harm to the church. We be¬ 
lieve, further, that they are absolutely es¬ 
sential to the safety of the church. A 
church is safe only as it is alive. 

Another objector will have it that all 
this opens the way to spiritual loss, even 
disaster to the thinker himself. To which 
we reply that we have danger in any plan. 
What about the danger that young men 
run of reacting violently against ultra¬ 
conservative attitudes toward science and 
scientific truth? After an observation ex¬ 
tending through thirty years I am in doubt 
as to whether professedly conservative theo¬ 
logical schools do not send out upon the 
church theological radicals—and poorly 
equipped radicals at that. The student 
too conservatively taught is likely some 
day to react against conservative teaching 
and then try to find his way along alone, 
with the result that his progressive temper 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 195 


is raw and possibly fierce. There is only 
one method of safety in this scientific day, 
and that is to face all the newer statements 
of science bearing on religion openly and 
frankly and let discussion do its best or 
its worst. 

I labor this point at the risk of belabor¬ 
ing it. Truth is so important that we 
must not block any channel through which 
it may arrive. Even if we do not have the 
scientific temper—and the majority of us 
do not—we must get into the attitude of 
hospitality toward scientific claims. Hos¬ 
pitality does not mean that we are to take 
in as a permanent guest everything that 
calls itself scientific, but it does mean that 
we are to entertain scientific strangers long 
enough to see if they are angels. A num¬ 
ber of years ago a bill was introduced into 
the Legislature of Massachusetts to forbid 
the teaching of certain unconventional fol¬ 
lies—in physical healing, I believe. William 
James appeared to protest against the pas¬ 
sage of the bill. Probably nobody in the 
Assembly knew better the nonsense of the 
particular views at which the bill aimed 
than did James—trained as he was both in 



196 


LIVING TOGETHER 


physiology and psychology. Moreover, 
James recognized the right of a community 
to protect itself against crazy medical 
practice. He protested, however, against 
any limitation of discussion of any scientific 
themes, on the broad ground that if we 
close up even supposedly dangerous doors, 
we shut entrances through which truth may 
be revealed. James was right. When we 
contemplate the inertia of the human mind, 
its unwillingness to surrender a view to 
which it has become snugly adjusted, the 
vested interests, not merely financial but 
emotional and intellectual, we can see 
that oftentimes along with the cranks who 
haunt the outer courts of the kingdom of 
the learned there may be a Columbus with 
the promise of a new East in his strange 
jargon. 

A word about vested interests other than 
financial. When we speak of vested in¬ 
terests we usually refer to stocks and 
bonds which may be disturbed by new 
social teachings. We are not just now 
thinking of social theories or of stocks and 
bonds. Such vested interests are not the 
only ones working on the side of a too stiff 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 197 


conservatism. Here is a teacher who has 
been trained in the classics at heavy ex¬ 
pense of time and money. The time and 
money are not in themselves the weightiest 
factors making for conservatism as over 
against an emphasis on the sciences. The 
teacher has invested himself in the study 
and teaching of the classics, so that he in 
all sincerity cannot see the way clear to 
cast his vote in faculty meeting for a modi¬ 
fication of curriculum which would make 
larger room for the present-day scientific 
tendencies. So in spite of many, many 
teachers who, trained in the methods of a 
generation ago, nevertheless welcome the 
new, the teacher with a vested interest 
stands against the progressive view. This 
is especially true with teachers by the score 
whose meager salaries have prevented their 
getting a chance at intellectual progress. 
The underpaid teacher is almost always un¬ 
progressive, for he has never had a chance 
to get a new vested interest. 

The case is similar with the ministry. A 
barrel of sermons is a vested interest, 
though it might be fine if preachers to-day 
wrote more, inasmuch as the writing habit 


198 


LIVING TOGETHER 


is the intellectually organizing habit. Meth¬ 
ods of thinking that get fastened on the 
mind are almost literally vested interests. 
Upset to such methods is oftentimes as 
damaging as an earthquake to an old and 
settled community. Congregations can ac¬ 
quire vested interests in habits of thinking 
and feeling and doing. 

Is it not, however, folly to be thus on 
the lookout for all this new light suppos¬ 
edly coming from the scientific quarter 
when there is so much that is established 
and wholesome which Christian pulpits and 
schools can preach and teach? If all our 
time were given to gazing off toward scien¬ 
tific high places, we should indeed be guilty 
of grave error. I do not plead for that. I 
even have serious doubts as to whether the 
preacher should often bring controversial 
theological themes into the pulpit. These 
can be better handled in discussion groups 
where there is opportunity for question and 
answer. Still, the realm of scientific think¬ 
ing is preeminently the progressive realm— 
using the words "scientific” and "progres¬ 
sive” in the best sense—and the church is 
under obligation to keep wrestling with the 



BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 199 


thought problems presented by the use of 
the scientific method. It is only the in¬ 
vestigating teacher who is the inspiring, 
quickening teacher. This is as true of a 
teaching church as it is of a teaching indi¬ 
vidual. The church must inquire and in¬ 
quire and inquire to save its own mind. In 
keeping its mind saved it has a chance to 
keep its soul saved. 

The objection comes once more that the 
church could get along better with science 
if science were not so destructive in tem¬ 
per. Science is always telling us to doubt 
whatever we cannot prove, whereas reli¬ 
gion must always ask us to believe many 
things beyond the realm of proof. This 
distinction, however, is overdrawn. Science 
takes for granted many things that cannot 
be proved, and always will have so to do. 
Religion doubts many things, and always 
must. Religion and science will have to 
join hands in some works of destruction, 
but both are at bottom constructive. Let 
me repeat what I said about the function 
of the progressive in holding ideas before 
the church until they become familiar. It 



200 


LIVING TOGETHER 


is not necessary for the progressive always 
to be attacking what he calls out-of-date 
views. Some attack is necessary, for such 
views may be worshiped as idols. Then the 
demand is for the idol-smasher. The at¬ 
tack of the idol-smasher, however, may not 
succeed by smashing the idol, but by relo¬ 
cating it, in getting it out of one place to 
another where its true significance is ob¬ 
vious. The idol-smasher wants the room of 
the idol for something else and the quickest 
way is to show the impotence of the idol. 
If some archaeologist should to-morrow dis¬ 
cover a golden calf like that which Aaron 
made, and should discover also evidence 
that the chosen people had worshiped, at 
some time or other, that very calf, there 
would not arise in Christendom an outcry 
for the destruction of the calf. We are too 
far along for that. We would regard the 
calf most highly, as possibly a most val¬ 
uable article for a museum. Now, the only 
way to get some ideas out of vital control 
over the theologians, and over scientists, 
for that matter, is to attack them. First 
the power of the idea idols is shattered, 
after that they are put in a minor place, 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE £01 


and finally they are labeled for the theo¬ 
logical museum. 

Not many ideas or institutions can be 
destroyed outright, but, as Lincoln said of 
slavery, if they are wrong, they can be 
put in the course of ultimate extinction. 
Or, in biological phrase, they can be 
brought to atrophy through disuse. Still, 
few changes are brought about by mere 
disuse. There must be the positive use of 
something better. The church finds a 
more excellent way. She announces that 
way. The old way ceases to be crowded, 
then falls out of repair, then becomes 
grass-grown, and at last is forgotten, ex¬ 
cept for its name on the theological map, 
while the people throng the better theo¬ 
logical highway. 

A cynic, speaking some months ago of 
the church and science, said that there is 
no longer any need of the church, that the 
chief function of the church in human so¬ 
ciety has always been destructive, that its 
business has been to urge men to kill their 
fellows in war, but that now science has 
discovered such effective ways of killing 
that the church can be henceforth dis- 


202 


LIVING TOGETHER 


mantled. There is enough substance in 
this venomous jibe to suggest to us, by 
contrast, the need of a union of religion 
and science in a world-wide constructive 
purpose. The church has indeed sanctioned 
destruction in war after war. We may say 
if we will that religion and the church are 
not necessarily one and the same, but for 
the present question the distinction does 
not greatly help us. The church is made 
up of people, in overwhelming majority 
religious, who have sincerely called on God 
to bless war. Science, with a purely scien¬ 
tific impersonalism, has pointed out the 
deadliest way of killing by wholesale. This 
is not the whole story, to be sure, but it is 
one terrible chapter. Can we not turn 
our backs on the past and seek to follow a 
new life in social upbuilding, following the 
commandment of God? 

The place to begin, we repeat, is with 
the task of building up the broken world 
in which we now find ourselves. If the 
scientist will have it that science must 
seek knowledge for its own sake without 
regard to practical consequences, and if the 
upholder of religion maintains that religion 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 203 


must be more than works of relief, let both 
and all remember that in actual active 
service of men there arise those states of 
mind and of feeling which make for the 
sensitiveness out of which we achieve both 
scientific and spiritual discoveries. What 
we may think of as the lower, more practi¬ 
cal activities may in the end release the 
higher intellectual and spiritual energies, 
just as digging and crushing rock and earth 
at last bring the engineer to the seizure of 
those rare but mighty forces which inhere 
in radium. 

The outlook to some men to-day is dark 
as they feel after God merely by the men¬ 
tal processes of the scientist. The heavens 
seem brass above some religious teachers 
who try, merely by thinking, to find out 
God. If we are to consider an acute cur¬ 
rent debate, the evolutionary statement, 
with its long-time measures and its incred¬ 
ibly slow stages, with its tracing in detailed 
steps the progress upward through lower to 
higher forms of life, is declared by the 
“fundamentalist” theology particularly to 
be out of harmony with any belief in God. 

I hold no brief for the doctrine of evo- 


204 


LIVING TOGETHER 


lution, but evolution in some form is likely 
here to stay. The fundamentalist may 
vote it down, but the fundamentalist’s 
children will adjust themselves to it, and 
will probably be quite as religious as the 
fundamentalist. A greater feat of adjust¬ 
ment of religion to science than that re¬ 
quired by uniting theism and evolutionary 
method has already been performed. I 
refer to the adjustment to the Copernican 
theory. The Ptolemaic theory, with the 
earth as its center, fits in better with our 
preconceptions of the dignity of man and 
the creative methods of God. Let us give 
our fancy rein for a moment. The stars 
nearest the earth are four light years dis¬ 
tant. That is to say, it would take us four 
years, traveling with the speed of light, or 
186,000 miles a second, to reach them. 
Suppose we could travel the four years to 
a star and should find there intelligences 
with whom we could communicate. It 
would require a large-sized celestial direc¬ 
tory in that star to find space for mention 
of an astronomical speck like the earth. 
We would experience a realizing sense that 
we had been dwellers on the planet in an 


BETTER TERMS WITH SCIENCE 205 


out-of-the-way, obscure country lane of the 
universe rather than on one of the main 
highways. 

Space measures of inconceivable magni¬ 
tude are employed in astronomy, and time 
measures also. What becomes of man amid 
such yard-sticks and clocks? To all of this 
the religious mind has adjusted itself and 
holds fast the idea of God. Recall what I 
said in an earlier paragraph—the earth 
may be insignificant, but the dwellers on 
the earth have been significant enough to 
read the secrets of the universe. If we 
have not lost God in the infinite spaces of 
the Copernican universe, we need not lose 
him in the long-time stretches of the evo¬ 
lutionary theory. 

Of course, the problem of human and 
animal pain is with us as almost opaque 
mystery on any theory. Here the solution 
is not by reason but by faith, faith in the 
Christlikeness of the God of Christ. Such 
faith is a distinct spiritual achievement, but 
when achieved can get along better with 
evolutionary than with nonevolutionary 
theories. 


VI 


CHRISTIANITY AND RISING TIDES 

OF COLOR 

Since the close of the Great War ob¬ 
servers of world conditions have noted, 
some with gratification and some with 
alarm, that there is a new temper among 
the so-called non-Christian nations, chiefly 
among the so-called peoples of color. One 
affrighted journalist fears that this rising 
tide may sweep everything of Western 
civilization away. Another rejoices in the 
temper as a sign of a new self-dependence 
among peoples hitherto set upon and 
abused and exploited by Europe. In any 
case the writers use the word 4 ‘rising.” 
The rising may be the rising of a tide of 
color, or it may be the rising of a spirit of 
wrath, or the rising of a new day of democ¬ 
racy in the East, but it is admittedly a 
rising of something. 

This changed spirit makes a new prob¬ 
lem for Christianity, or it puts an old 

problem in a new light. We cannot as 

206 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 207 


glibly as of old use the eloquence as to 
how superior Christian nations are to 
non-Christian, and how desperately the 
non-Christian nations are in need of evan¬ 
gelization by the Occident. The non- 
Christian nations may admit a need of 
salvation, but they are not so ready to 
admit now as formerly that the Christian 
nations are the agents of salvation. As 
saviours of the world we do not stand as 
high as we did a few years ago. The spec¬ 
tacle of Christian nations tearing at one 
another’s throats has not been an evangel 
of lofty order. Moreover, the intelligent 
non-Christian is beginning to suspect that 
the recent fighting was not merely for 
transcendent ideals of political liberty, but 
that it had back of it also a greed for world 
markets and raw materials, and that the 
non-Christian nations themselves are in 
danger of being part of the ultimate spoil 
of so-called Christian civilization. The 
non-Christian peoples have, again, bor¬ 
rowed some of the idea weapons with which 
we found it so easy to fight from 1914 to 
1918, the weapon of self-determination in 
particular. If it were not for the con- 


208 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ceivably tragic outcome of the new tem¬ 
per, it would be humorous to note how 
neatly this doctrine of self-determination 
has been turned by the so-called non- 
Christian nations themselves from a state¬ 
ment of an abstract ideal for them to a 
definite program by them. Self-determina¬ 
tion is a slogan which will be used more 
and more by the East itself against the 
exploitation of the East by the West. 

In view of this rising, or already risen, 
temper it is imperative that Christianity 
take on herself the responsibility for the 
Christianization of her international and 
racial contacts. The Christian mission¬ 
aries go out to different types of nations, 
to professedly Christian nations with a 
Christianity like that of Roman Catholi¬ 
cism; to independent nations like China or 
Japan whose religion is non-Christian; to 
nations or social groups like India and the 
Philippines which are dependencies of other 
groups; to the so-called nonadult peoples 
like the African tribes. All forms of mis¬ 
sionary approach are to proceed on a deep 
and sincere respect for the peoples ap¬ 
proached. This is the absolutely indispen- 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 209 


sable prerequisite. It means henceforth a 
shift from the paternal and condescending 
well-wishing which would patronize the 
non-Christian, or the Christian of different 
type from that of the missionary; it means 
warfare against any governmental or com¬ 
mercial treatment of so-called backward 
peoples which overlooks the claims of es¬ 
sential humanity. 

I think I know something of the short¬ 
comings of the Roman Catholic system as 
applied to missionary tasks, but I must 
never forget that Roman Catholicism, in 
dealing with all its problems, aims to meet 
certain thoroughly human demands. I re¬ 
ject as ardently as any Protestant the 
overcentralization of the Roman Church, 
but I must not forget that in spite of the 
overcentralization, in spite of any part 
which compulsion through fear may, as is 
so often alleged, play in Catholic loyalty, 
in spite of use of worldly means for eccle¬ 
siastical ends and in spite, too, of alliance 
with controlling classes as against masses, 
still the Roman Church has its power 
through meeting some outstanding human 
needs. Roman Catholicism is the pre- 


210 


LIVING TOGETHER 


dominant religion in some countries be¬ 
cause the peoples of those countries crave 
that type. In their attendance upon the 
Roman Church such peoples are voting for 
that church. Quite possibly they ought to 
desire another type; but he who goes to 
preach in a Roman Catholic country must 
see how the church meets the demands of 
that country, and then by actual life show 
a more excellent way. Especially is it folly 
to talk in a Catholic country of the low 
type of national life fostered by Catholi¬ 
cism, for then the national pride is 
wounded. Fostering is impossible without 
the consent of the fostered. 

Whatever the form of religion in the 
land where the missionary works he must 
try to understand that religion. Religion 
is like democracy or morality in that an 
underlying spirit may take on diverse 
forms. One of the most difficult spiritual 
achievements for an American Christian, 
even though he be filled with a spirit of 
humble devotion to his Lord, is to respect 
a democracy of any other than an Anglo- 
Saxon form. In a genuine sense democracy 
is not so new as we sometimes fancy. The 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR £11 


popular will has always shaped the insti¬ 
tutions of many countries which we do not 
think of as democratic. It is well for na¬ 
tions to have the most up-to-date machin¬ 
ery of democracy, of course, but sometimes 
a thoroughly democratic expression can be 
made through imperfect machinery. We 
can seldom judge an institution by what 
the institution seems on the face of it to 
be. For illustration, the Constitution of 
the United States was not originally in¬ 
tended to be as democratic as it now is. 
We have only to read the provisions about 
the election of the President by the elec¬ 
toral college to be convinced of the un¬ 
democratic intention of the framers of the 
Constitution. A reader of the Constitu¬ 
tion may declare that it is possible for the 
electoral college to defeat the will of the 
people. So it is, on paper, but now utterly 
impossible in fact. 

The forms of institutions may not mean 
much, but the spirit back of them means 
everything. In spirit peoples may be demo¬ 
cratic while anything but democratic in 
form. England is a monarchy, with a place 
for lords and dukes, but the people rule. 


212 


LIVING TOGETHER 


In some Latin countries there is a reliance 
upon revolutionary methods which now and 
again prevents diplomatic recognition by 
the United States of America—since our 
nation through its State Department as¬ 
sumes to be the judge and censor of all 
types of democracy. Yet, if Latin-American 
revolution meets a national demand, or ex¬ 
presses a national mood, it is in a rough, 
fierce way democratic. When we look away 
to peoples like the Chinese it may be hard 
for us to discern anything democratic, but 
so far as local self-government is concerned 
China is the most democratic nation in all 
history. The trouble with China is that 
public opinion counts not for too little but 
for too much. What does Chinese 4 ‘saving 
face” mean if not that the determining fac¬ 
tor in Chinese life is the opinion of the 
group? The Chinese have through long 
periods got along without elaborate legal or 
police or military systems simply by the 
pressure of control through public opinion. 

I lay emphasis on democracy as an illus¬ 
tration because we Americans think of our¬ 
selves as specialists in democracy. If es¬ 
sential democracy can exist under diverse 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 213 


forms, so also can essential morality. The 
chief element in morality which we can 
think of as at all absolute is the will to do 
right; but just what is right in a given set 
of circumstances must be determined by 
study of those circumstances. The same 
moral impulse in two persons may express 
itself under quite opposed forms of con¬ 
duct. Religion is under the same law . A 
fundamentally religious spirit can express 
itself in various ways in differing racial 
groups. 

This does not mean that all forms of 
democracy or morality or religion are on 
the same plane of value. Surely, some 
forms of democratic procedure are better 
than others, and moral and religious im¬ 
pulses may express themselves in utterly 
mistaken and perverted forms. The mis¬ 
sionary goes forth to war against all such 
mistakes, but he must not fall into a super¬ 
cilious and condescending tendency to con¬ 
demn or to patronize. 

We have spoken of trying to work among 
nations which are dependencies like India 
and the Philippines. Here the problem is 



214 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tangled and intricate. I doubt if a mis¬ 
sionary can be of surpassing value in such 
countries if he does not sincerely become 
so much a partisan of the native point of 
view as to be willing to oppose, if need be, 
the point of view of his own nation. If 
in a dependency the suspicion gets abroad 
into the social consciousness that the de¬ 
pendency is always to be a dependency, 
and that the foreigner is always to rule, 
there is no chance of preaching the gospel 
in any but the most meager measure. In¬ 
dividual souls may indeed be saved, but 
there is no hope of the social transforma¬ 
tion which comes with the liberty of the 
sons of God. Many careful observers of 
mission work—some with long personal 
experience in India—say that even in spite 
of all the material advantages which Eng¬ 
land has undoubtedly given India, China 
will produce a better type of Christianity 
in the long run, if China remains free while 
India does not attain to practical self- 
determination. Dependent peoples to-day 
are not necessarily in suffering through de¬ 
pendency. The material needs of India 
and the Philippines are probably better 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 215 


met than the people could meet them with¬ 
out dependency. The difficulty is more 
subtle. A tinge of hopelessness sooner or 
later comes into the spirit of the dependent 
peoples which leads to dejection in some, 
rebellion in others, contempt for foreigners 
in still others. Was it altogether gain that 
the experiences of the Jew^s deepened their 
racial consciousness into the stiff, unyield¬ 
ing quality which we know them to possess? 
The Jews simply would not be crushed in 
spirit. That was to their credit. They 
could not successfully fight as a nation 
against Babylon or Rome. They, indeed, 
saved the one religion in the world worth 
saving, but at a heavy cost to themselves 
and to the religion itself. Dejection and 
rebelliousness and contempt are not moods 
which make for the triumph of the gospel. 
The same fundamental respect must mark 
all contacts with the so-called backward, 
nonadult peoples. The dealing of the for¬ 
ward nations with the backward nations 
has been thus far one almost unrelieved 
horror—horror continuing down to the 
bombing of Hottentots from aeroplanes 
just a few weeks ago. If the forward na- 


216 


LIVING TOGETHER 


tions should from now on till doomsday 
set themselves to make amends for wrongs 
done backward nations in the past, they 
could not wipe out the stains of the long 
outrage, of peoples slaughtered or cor¬ 
rupted, of forms of culture wiped out be¬ 
yond recollection, of social ideals hurled 
down to earth. The first step toward such 
atonement, however, is this respect on 
which I lay such wearisome emphasis. The 
most unenlightened human being in the 
heart of Africa is a human being, and must 
be treated as such. He may be “non- 
adult,” but the way we get nonadults on 
toward manhood is to begin to assume 
their manhood and to treat them as men. 
Nonadults are the last persons we ought to 
rob or kill. 

It is the business of the Christian Church 
in dealing with so-called child, or nonadult 
peoples, to take them seriously and to 
teach them to take themselves seriously. 
There is growing recognition throughout 
the world to-day of the sinfulness of physi¬ 
cally mistreating or robbing these so-called 
child peoples, though there are still enough 
dark spots that need looking into. There 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 217 


is not, I fear, such increasing recognition of 
the wrong and peril of not taking the prob¬ 
lem of the nonadult races seriously. 

To begin near home, let us think of the 
Negro problem in the United States. It is 
easy to dismiss the whole Negro question 
with the summary observation that the 
Negro is a child and belongs to a child- 
race—this too in contempt of the fact that 
Negro labor made possible the development 
of one phase of American civilization, and 
that the Negro has, since he came into his 
freedom, made longer strides of progress, 
in the given period, than any other race in 
the history of the world. Now, what do 
we do when we call the Negro a child? 
Do we recognize in him the serious prob¬ 
lem that we recognize in childhood as such? 
Hardly. We, with rich good humor, en¬ 
courage him to do the childish things. 
Negro comedy is refreshingly funny at 
times, but there is always a tinge of pathos 
in the reflection that we applaud the Negro 
most loudly when he is expressing himself 
in the fashion that brings out most clearly 
his childish traits. Years ago multitudes 
of men were inclined to treat the Negro in 



218 


LIVING TOGETHER 


kindly manner if he would acquiesce in 
being a slave. To-day many of us would 
be glad to treat the Negro kindly if he 
would be content to remain a child. It is 
the stride out toward manhood which dis¬ 
turbs us. The rising tide of color is a good 
sign if it means, as it largely does, that the 
races which have been looked upon as non¬ 
adult are insisting upon being taken seri¬ 
ously. 

At the bottom of all sound missionary 
policy must lie this respect for men as 
men. It is altogether doubtful if pity can 
be an adequate missionary motive, for pity 
is too apt to fall away from respect. It 
may even end in contempt. To the credit 
of the missionary be it said that though 
his work often begins in pity it usually 
moves up toward increase of respect. It is 
interesting to note this deepening transfor¬ 
mation in a book like that of Dr. Albert 
Schweitzer, On the Edge of the Primeval 
Forest. Dr. Schweitzer was so stirred by 
the dream of working for the relief of dis¬ 
tress in Africa that he resigned a theo¬ 
logical professorship, trained himself in 
medicine and surgery, found the money 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 219 


for a missionary enterprise, and plunged 
into equatorial Africa on his errand of 
pitying mercy. It is most inspiring to 
note the growth of Schweitzer’s respect for 
the Africans with whom he worked as we 
read the pages of his book. 

Granted, then, the basis of respect, what 
shall be our practical attitude toward non- 
Christian peoples? The day is gone when 
we can put civilization on peoples by force. 
There must be consent to accept and co¬ 
operation in the upward movement. It is 
doubtful if peoples have ever been cul¬ 
turally transformed except by their own 
consent. The most serious attempt at 
Christianization by force ever made was 
that of Spain in America. On the surface 
it appears that Spain won a huge civilizing 
victory by the sword. The Spanish lan¬ 
guage, the Spanish laws, the Spanish cus¬ 
toms were introduced over continent 
lengths. Still, the victory was only to 
the extent that the peoples accepted all 
this themselves. So far as actual force 
went the best persons of the peoples whom 
the Spanish met were killed off. 



220 


LIVING TOGETHER 


What, then, shall we give the non- 
Christian peoples? I am not sure that we 
do well to give them anything in the out¬ 
right sense. What, then, shall we put 
before them, or recommend to them, or 
persuade them to take? 

The first advice is that we give them the 
material instruments of our civilization. 
That is sound enough if we can transmit 
with the tool the spiritual mastery over 
the tool. Even backward races learn 
quickly to master physically the tools of 
the more favored races. The Red Indians 

X 

can learn to shoot the white man’s rifle 
most skillfully, but an idea of revengeful 
fighting quite inconsequential among war¬ 
riors using bows and arrows may be deadly 
when a people keep the old idea and shoot 
the new weapon. Still, the users of guns 
among the professedly favored races have 
not been as yet conspicuously successful in 
controlling the guns. It is to be questioned 
whether man’s ability to use explosives has 
not far outrun his sense of responsibility in 
the use of them. Lowell used to say opti¬ 
mistically that God would not have al¬ 
lowed men to get hold of the match box if 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 221 


the universe had not been fire-proof. Man 
has certainly got hold of the match box, 
and it is not by any means clear that the 
universe is fire-proof. 

I was not, however, thinking of guns, 
except for purposes of illustration. We are 
getting nearer the heart of the matter when 
we consider all the material enginery of 
modern industrialism. There are many 
among us who look out toward a land like 
China, a nation too independent and too 
strong to be forced against her will, and 
say that what China needs is industrializa¬ 
tion, that nobody is going to force indus¬ 
trialization on China, that all that is neces¬ 
sary is to open the mill doors and Chinese 
will come in by the hundred thousand. 

Let us try to follow out in imagination 
this process of the industrialization of 
China. It is manifest that the mighty 
tools of industrialization must come from 
Europe and America. China has not the 
capital at command to build railways and 
mills and to open mines and to develop 
water and electric power. So Western cap¬ 
ital puts the mills on the banks of the 



m LIVING TOGETHER 

Yangtse, let us say. The people begin to 
flock in. Wages are dreadfully low, judged 
by Western standards, but they are better 
than the wages to which the Chinese work¬ 
ers have been accustomed. Women and 
children are employed, but otherwise they 
might earn nothing. For a time all goes 
promisingly—until the industrialization be¬ 
gins fundamentally to alter the character 
of Chinese life. That life has always been 
primarily agricultural. Eighty-five per cent 
of the Chinese are employed in rural pur¬ 
suits in one form or another, the cultiva¬ 
tion of the soil being of that intensive sort 
known as spade culture. Under indus¬ 
trialization more and more people will go 
to the mill centers. As long as mill work 
is intended only to eke out the income of 
the farm, as long as it provides work for 
those who can be spared for a few weeks 
at a time from farm labor, no considerable 
harm may be done. To take large num¬ 
bers of Chinese off the soil permanently, 
however, might make a change in Chinese 
society little short of disastrous. The fam¬ 
ily units would be destroyed, the popula¬ 
tion as a whole might increase to such an 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR m 


extent that a season of unemployment 
would be as fatal as a flood of the Y'ellow 
River. If the products of an industrialized 
China were thrown on the markets of the 
world, China could undersell other nations 
which have higher wage scales. Then we 
should have laws looking not merely to the 
exclusion of the Chinese from America but 
to the exclusion of Chinese goods from the 
entire Occident as well—with havoc for 
China and for the world. The Chinese 
work hard now, desperately hard, but at 
tasks which allow some initiative. The 
farmer is his own boss—he labors at his 
own rate of speed. The shop worker at 
present has interminably long hours, but 
the work is on a task which he can shape 
as he will, stopping now and again to chat 
or to smoke for two or three minutes. 
Western machinery is likely to be deadly 
to the Chinese. Even the rickshaw is a 
horrible destroyer of Chinese vitality. The 
rickshaw driver’s life, as a rickshaw driver, 
lasts about six years. If he survives six 
years, he must change his work. 

Now, what forces can make the indus¬ 
trialization of China safe for the Chinese? 


224 


LIVING TOGETHER 


Can we depend upon the broad-minded 
humanity of Western capital? Conceiv¬ 
ably such capital might do much. It 
might insist upon safety devices on 
machinery, upon the best health condi¬ 
tions in the factories, upon kindly treat¬ 
ment of workers in all their contacts with 
overseers. There would be a stopping 
point, however. Capital would surely stop 
in China where it stops in America, namely, 
at giving the worker any real control over 
conditions under which he works, or over 
the general management of the enterprise 
in which he is engaged. Capital would not 
consider itself in China for missionary pur¬ 
poses. It is there to make money. 

So far as Western civilization is con¬ 
cerned we would have to admit that our 
industrial instruments would be put upon 
the Chinese without the safeguards with 
which we hedge about industrialism in 
Europe and America. Industrialism has 
been developed in the Western countries 
slowly, and as soon as a danger has been 
discovered some mechanical or legal ap¬ 
pliance has been contrived to lessen the 
danger. Public sentiment has conditioned 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 225 


the use of our industrial creations. Even 
with us, nevertheless, the evils of industry- 
are still a threat to our civilization. How 
much worse when this industrial system is 
put outright before a land like China, a 
land with a huge labor force, with none of 
the legal protections of the West! Public 
sentiment in the Western lands cannot 
adequately govern the operation of West¬ 
ern capital when that capital is invested in 
factories in Eastern lands. 

There is nothing left except for the 
Chinese to handle the matter themselves. 
This they are indeed able to do, after a 
fashion. The Chinese have a talent for 
and skill in organization hardly credible 
till it is seen at work. They know how to 
strike and to boycott like past-masters. 
If, however, Western labor wars are to be 
transferred to the Orient, the outlook is 
not bright. The whole problem is dark. 
If China lets in industrialism without any 
safeguards, the Chinese people will be 
hopelessly exploited. If only supplies of 
raw materials would be used up, the prob¬ 
lem would be bad enough, but the waste 
would be in human forces. If China begins 


226 


LIVING TOGETHER 


to fight against industrialization from with¬ 
out, she may find herself confronted by 
Western militarism in its worst aspect. If 
as a result of disturbance Western capital¬ 
ism withdraws altogether, China will suf¬ 
fer a lack of development which she needs. 

If Christianity could be introduced in its 
wider phases, the danger could be con¬ 
trolled. If capitalism could be tamed at 
home and its ideal of gain replaced by the 
ideal of service, if the Chinese would so 
take hold of Christianity as to get a new 
insight into the value of the individual 
human life, we could breathe easily. This 
all brings us back to the consideration that 
we have here a world-wide problem in 
which world-wide factors must cooperate. 
The rising tide of Chinese color is a meas¬ 
ure of protest against Western industrial¬ 
ism, and is so far so good. The world is 
not safe, however, until Chinese public 
opinion is essentially Christian, and Chi¬ 
nese public opinion cannot be conquered 
from the outside save by persuasion and 
reasonableness. Nor is there much sense 
in talking of the Christianization of Chinese 
public opinion with the public opinion of 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR m 

so-called Christian nations so far from 
Christian. 

Let us turn from industry to science. A 
traveler in China after a short trip comes 
to the conclusion that what China needs 
is Western science, or the use of the scien¬ 
tific method in all phases of her activity, 
not merely in industry but in all phases of 
life. He deplores the rule-of-thumb inac¬ 
curacies which come with the lack of all 
material or intellectual instruments of pre¬ 
cision. He is horrified especially at the 
crude methods with which disease is met 
and at the general backwardness of sani¬ 
tary knowledge. The Chinese language 
seems to him to be a bungling contrivance 
which will have to be scrapped before there 
can be any long leaps ahead. It would be 
impossible to teach science with a language 
like that of China as the means of com¬ 
munication. 

This all seems simple at a superficial 
glance, but at bottom we have here an 
enormous difficulty. Science cannot be in¬ 
troduced to a people without that people’s 
active consent. There is no way of de- 



228 


LIVING TOGETHER 


veloping intellectual precision except by 
self-effort. It is impossible to change a 
condition as to the health of a community 
without the intelligent cooperation of that 
community. Experiences like the fight 
against cholera in Canton, which was suc¬ 
cessful, show how well large groups of 
Chinese can work together for a scientific 
result, but the adoption of modern medi¬ 
cine and sanitation requires the persuasive 
education of hundreds of thousands. Such 
effort in the nature of things calls for will¬ 
ing, hearty, unreserved consent, and the 
right use of science demands the absorp¬ 
tion of a spirit of humanity and an em¬ 
phasis on human values, an absorption and 
emphasis by no means yet achieved in the 
scientific nations. The World War was an 
illustration of the deadliness of the union 
of a method completely scientific with a 
temper incompletely Christian. All of this 
means a call for the presentation of the 
deeper and wider Christian life in its most 
convincing and attractive persuasiveness. 
The difficulty here is immense but not in¬ 
superable. We are caught in a movement 
from which we cannot draw back. West- 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 229 


ern science will go into China. It ought 
not to go in without Christianity. It is 
the duty of Christianity to enter China. 
It cannot force an entrance, but must place 
itself in a position and attitude where it 
will be freely accepted by the Chinese. 

This carries us far. It gives to the 
Chinese the right and power to shape the 
type of Christianity which is to be Chinese 
—the same right which we have insisted 
on through the centuries for ourselves. 
How much did early Christianity carry 
into the Roman Empire except Jesus—his 
thought of God and of man, his life and 
his death? From the very beginning the 
appropriating power of the converts went 
to work utilizing Greek, Roman, Oriental 
elements to set forth Jesus. It was so in 
the beginning, it is so now, it will be so all 
through the course of human history. 

This does not mean that the Oriental 
peoples will create a new Christianity, 
though Christianity will vastly expand 
their creative powers. Progress will go 
forward by a process of selection. Out of 
the variety and profusion of Christian be¬ 
liefs the Orientals will make their own 


230 


LIVING TOGETHER 


selection, probably choosing what falls in 
best with Oriental aptitudes. Some be¬ 
liefs quite important to us will be allowed 
to atrophy through disuse. Others which 
we may not think of as especially vital 
may be seized upon for large elaboration. 
As long as the Christ of God and the God 
of Christ are kept at the center of this 
development no harm can come. An or¬ 
ganism does not swell from an acorn into 
a tree. It begins to grow, and its growth 
means that it selects for itself some ele¬ 
ments from its environment and casts some 
previously useful elements out of itself— 
all in accord with the law of life inherent 
in the organism itself. 

Recurring for the moment to China, we 
may speak of the exceedingly practical 
nature of the Chinese. A great French 
student of Chinese life, Eugene Simon, has 
pointed out that the Chinese religion is the 
only one that has not represented manual 
labor as a curse. Simon may somewhat 
have overstated his thesis, but he has 
grasped an essential truth. It is likely 
that the development of Christianity in 
Chinese hands will seize on its practical 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 231 


phases. A year or two ago there was hope 
in some circles and fear in others that the 
Chinese would take hold of the extreme 
forms of premillenarianism which are so 
popular with some Christian teachers at 
home and abroad to-day. After the Shang¬ 
hai Christian Conference in May, 1922, it 
became clear that there was small likeli¬ 
hood of such acceptance of premillenarian¬ 
ism by the Chinese. The doctrine is too 
much up in the air, too spectacular, too 
remote from the obvious significance of 
Christianity. The Chinese will no doubt 
listen to the more fine-spun of the Chris¬ 
tian doctrines with due deference and 
respect, but that will be all. 

This brings us to consider the wisdom of 
getting the power of the church in China 
into Chinese hands at the earliest prac¬ 
ticable date. We must hold to an inter¬ 
national church, provided we can get one 
that is truly international. A national 
church brings into Christianity something 
that may prove alien to Christianity, for 
in its essence Christianity is not merely 
national. A Christian organization may 



232 


LIVING TOGETHER 


f 

indeed take advantage of a national spirit 
to set Christianity on high, but the na¬ 
tional spirit must be kept in the secondary 
place. Otherwise let a war drum sound 
and the national spirit takes control, to 
the utter exclusion of the spirit of Christ. 

The difficulty is that we do not yet have 
an international Protestant Church. Take 
the situation in Methodism. The General 
Conference is the supreme law-making 
body. The overwhelming majority in that 
body come from the United States. The 
delegates from China and India are in¬ 
terested onlookers. The Negroes from the 
United States are the only representatives 
of any race other than the white who get 
any effective vote except when an issue is 
decided by a narrow margin. Once in a 
General Conference of which I was a mem¬ 
ber it appeared that a particular measure 
which had carried by a small margin had 
been supported by all the votes of foreign 
delegates. I shall not soon forget the 
horror with which an ecclesiastical leader, 
himself an elequent advocate of missions, 
cried out against the foreign votes settling 
a question which was distinctively peculiar 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 233 


to the United States. Yet that same 
churchman had repeatedly voted to settle 
questions distinctively foreign. 

When I say that the power should more 
and more pass to the foreign field itself I 
mean to the natives on that field. Often 
missionaries clamor for more power for the 
foreign field, but all they may mean is that 
they do not want the missionary policies 
settled in a New York office. They may 
not mean that they want the natives to 
have decisive power. It is bad to have 
bishops or secretaries from America clothed 
with large authority over foreign workers 
in the land of those workers themselves. It 
is doubtful if any but the exceptional 
human being is wise enough or good enough 
to have authority in spiritual concerns over 
a native in another country. Such power 
is almost always an evil for the officials 
themselves. Episcopacies and secretary¬ 
ships are safe only when those who have 
to undergo the supervision will talk back, 
if need be. The most sturdy Chinese or 
Indians, through considerations of courtesy, 
if of nothing else, are too reluctant to 
speak in criticism or protest against Amer- 


234 


LIVING TOGETHER 


ican ecclesiastical officials. If the super¬ 
vised will not speak out, the supervisor al¬ 
most inevitably becomes a dictator, often 
an autocrat, sometimes a tyrant, occasion¬ 
ally a bully. 

It must be remembered that those com¬ 
ing into Christianity from outside peoples 
must be persuaded to take, or at least to 
try out, the elements of Christianity which 
promise most for those new converts. 
Teachers do better as teachers when they 
are stripped of authority. The world as a 
whole is not an educational institution run 
on the elective plan, but Christianity has 
to be run on the elective plan if it is to 
succeed at all. The Christian freely chooses 
to be a Christian in the first place, and he 
elects and selects from Christianity there¬ 
after the parts that minister to his spiritual 
needs. He himself is the best judge as to 
what meets those needs. 

Will it not make for less efficient Chris¬ 
tian progress if we turn over to Chinese or 
Indian peoples themselves larger and larger 
measures of ecclesiastical responsibility? It 
will, at least for a time, but here we have 
to ask the old democratic question: Which 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 235 


is better for a people—a good system ad¬ 
ministered from outside, or one not so 
good administered by the people them¬ 
selves? Remember that we are asking that 
missionaries still work on foreign fields, but 
that they should not have control. Let 
their power be that of influence rather 
than that of authority. The whole idea of 
authority should drop out of their minds. 
They should even beware of any appear¬ 
ance of alliance with governmental or dip¬ 
lomatic authorities, except as they appear 
as advocates of the people themselves 
among whom they are working. Mission¬ 
aries should avoid making any appeal to 
governmental authority, or giving impres¬ 
sion that any government, home or for¬ 
eign, is “back of them.” The pernicious 
practice of seeking the help of “key-men” 
in a foreign land is pernicious because in 
almost all foreign lands key-men are key- 
men because of relation to governmental 
or commercial interests. In any case they 
stand for the type of authority that thwarts 
the gospel. The authority sought for 
should be that of the growing Christian 
public sentiment of the people among whom 



236 


LIVING TOGETHER 


the missionary works—and that authority 
should find its own expression. 

The relation of Christianity to the so- 
called nonadult peoples constitutes the 
hardest problem. China and Japan and 
India can be trusted ultimately to shift 
for themselves. As to the nonadult peo¬ 
ples it may be said that the duty of the 
church is to stand as their champion 
against the encroachments of the white 
man’s civilization. It is doubtful if Chris¬ 
tian civilization can ever actually overtake 
the Christian ideals, so that the contact of 
civilization with noncivilization must be 
always watched. Suppose the three great 
principles that admittedly would make an 
ideal relationship between the so-called 
forward nations and the so-called back¬ 
ward nations to be universally adopted— 
the principle that the relationship is to be 
conceived of in terms of the good of all 
humanity, that the relationship must be for 
the welfare of the backward peoples, that 
if any incidental advantage accrue, after 
the above conditions have been met, such 
advantage go to the civilized nation imme- 



CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 237 


diately responsible for a given backward 
nation. Let us assume that these prin¬ 
ciples are heartily and unanimously put 
into effect by the nations of the earth. In 
every one of the principles there are possi¬ 
bilities of abuse. 

Take the first principle, the good of all 
humanity. Here are mighty riches in the 
tropics. Are these riches the property of 
the races who happen to live in the tropics? 
Let us imagine a tropical island on which 
grows a valuable medicinal plant of im¬ 
portance to mankind everywhere. The 
natives do not cultivate the plant except 
in the most haphazard fashion. They do 
not bring out to its full possibilities the 
development of the herb. There are com¬ 
paratively few native islanders all told. Is 
it fair to suffering humanity to allow this 
handful of natives to stand in the way of 
medicinal progress just because they hap¬ 
pen to own the island? Does not humanity 
have a right of eminent domain over all 
such treasures? Does the mere fact that 
the natives were born on the island give 
them the right to raise or neglect the me¬ 
dicinal plant as they please? 


£38 LIVING TOGETHER 

We do not go far on this track till we 
find ourselves in an ethical thicket. I do 
not see how, in such a supposed case, we 
could deny that the interests of humanity 
have the right of way. If the people of the 
island were fairly treated, if they were not 
robbed or abused, I can see most excellent 
moral reasons for civilization’s taking over 
the island, giving the owners reasonable 
compensation, and cultivating the plant 
according to most scientific methods. The 
case as thus assumed seems clear. 

The questions arise when we get away 
from the assumed case and move to actual 
facts. What about rubber, oil, coal, water¬ 
power? Are we to conclude that because 
possibilities like these are locked up in 
noncivilized countries the countries out¬ 
side are to have nothing to say about the 
development of such resources? The only 
way out is a conscientiously assumed trus¬ 
teeship on the part of the civilized nations, 
a trusteeship that will guard the resources 
themselves against wastefulness and the 
natives against chance of robbery. 

Why not leave all this to the private 
initiative of present-day capitalism? Why 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 239 


not, indeed! How many millions of brass 
rods and glass beads would it require to 
make an adequate return to central 
African tribes for the loss of rights in tropi¬ 
cal possessions which they have always 
held? What reason is there for letting the 
immense profits of such tropical enterprises 
go to the private pockets of investors five 
thousand miles from the tropics? The 
safety is in action for the benefit of man¬ 
kind as a whole, with conscience kept 
alert and sensitive—oversensitive rather 
than undersensitive—by the insistence of 
Christian leaders or agitators. Here would 
be a worthy field for the agitator’s con¬ 
stant lashing and scourging. Only such 
agitation would keep the international con¬ 
science from becoming drowsy and callous. 

The second principle is regard for the 
good of the backward peoples dealt with. 
Here again is grave danger. To ordinary 
civilized man it seems a good thing for the 
uncivilized to be put to work. The most 
distressing aspect of African life, let us say, 
to the professedly civilized man is the lazi¬ 
ness of that life. Now, to get the riches of 
the African tropics out to the world re- 




240 


LIVING TOGETHER 


quires labor, labor that the white man 
cannot perform as can the black. It is 
clear indeed that the conquest of the 
tropics is to go far enough to enable small 
numbers of white men to live in them. By 
precautions against mosquito infection, by 
artificial cooling of houses, by regular vaca¬ 
tions in a temperate clime it is possible for 
white men to exist in the tropics. The 
heavy manual work, however, must be done 
by black men. Three reasons can be given 
for making the labor of the black man 
compulsory: the work is necessary if the 
world is to have tropical products; the 
work is but a fair return by the black for 
the blessings of security and protection 
which he receives from the outside nation, 
a return paid in labor rather than in taxes; 
the cultivation of habits of industry is good 
for the black man. In the face of the fact 
that unselfish missionaries—undoubted 
friends of the African—have given their 
approval to schemes of compulsory labor, 
we must not hastily pass judgment against 
such policy. 

Still, the whole plan bristles with perils. 
Let it be granted that with a scheme of 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 241 


compulsory labor the overseeing nation will 
take care that no abuse at all remediable is 
tolerated. Nevertheless, the attempt to fit 
dwellers in a tropic land into anything at 
all resembling Western industrialism is a 
most hazardous venture. It is not so 
much that the native’s body does not 
make its adjustment as that the native’s 
mind does not make its adjustment. Then 
we have all the horrors of rebellion stamped 
out by the white man’s punishments, or 
we have the death of the native soul, which 
is worse. The sluggishness engendered by 
the climate is not the only reason why the 
African has been an unwilling worker for 
outsiders. All through the centuries the 
black man has worked hard enough, but 
with a tendency to slipshodness. All 
through the centuries the African has had 
the idea—a just idea too—that he has 
been working to make some one else rich. 
A whole civilization in the Southern States 
of America was built up on his practically 
unrequited toil. Compulsory labor, to an 
African, must be only slightly different 
from slavery. The African may be a be¬ 
nighted mind, but he has always known 


242 


LIVING TOGETHER 


that he has required little of food and 
clothing for himself. He has known that 
he has worked much longer every day 
than the hour or two required to meet his 
own needs. Where has the rest of the 
product of his labor gone? Even a non¬ 
adult mind can ask that question; and the 
adult mind is not overprompt in replying. 

It is almost impossible for any mind to 
know how to set about doing good for a 
mind of another race, especially when the 
minds are separated by the abyss between 
differing stages of cultural development. 
The intention on the part of the Christian 
nations to do good to other nations less ad¬ 
vanced than themselves is worthy enough, 
but it must be supplemented by almost 
superhuman intelligence and imagination. 
When it is agreed that the particular ad¬ 
vanced nation responsible for a backward 
nation is to have whatever advantage 
there may be left after the backward peo¬ 
ple has been benefited, the problem is 
serious indeed. 

There are those who, confronted by such 
a maze of difficulties, declare that the at¬ 
tempt to civilize and Christianize the back- 


CHRISTIANITY AND COLOR 243 

ward peoples is a failure. Let such peoples 
go their own paths. Let them keep their 
own type of cultural life. Better have 
them return to the old ways of tribal war 
and slaughter than to have them ruled 
over by outsiders. Their own religions, 
crude as they are from our point of view, 
are better than religions imposed from 
without. 

This would abandon the problem alto¬ 
gether. It is not, however, justifiable to 
have peoples now backward go backward 
still further. Is it preferable to have a 
medicine-man stick a needle into a baby’s 
eye to let out a devil rather than to have a 
skilled surgeon operate to let out pus? 
The Christian idea of God and man is 
better than any non-Christian idea of God 
and man. These lines are written, how¬ 
ever, in the conviction that the choice is 
not between compulsion and abandonment. 
There is a more excellent way, even the 
way of Paul’s lofty flight in the thirteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians. In respect 
and charity for the non-Christian the goods 
of Christianity can be set before the non- 
Christian world, for the non-Christian to 


244 


LIVING TOGETHER 


select from them, to receive them with 
sympathetic instruction and persuasion by 
the Christian, to receive them, as the 
scholastics put it, after the manner of the 
one receiving. The grasping hand will put 
its mark upon what it grasps. Christian¬ 
ity will “seize” the non-Christian world, 
and that world will “seize” Christianity, 
the seizures being mutually effective and 
determining. In the end will come that 
world-wide absorption in a world-wide task 
which will make a world-wide body of 
Christ, with the organs of that body de¬ 
veloping into finer and richer diversity and 
distinctiveness. 












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